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1. Calibrated Passability Perception in Virtual Reality Transfers to Augmented Reality

   https://doi.org/10.1145/3613450  

   Gagnon, Holly; Stefanucci, Jeanine; Creem-Regehr, Sarah; Bodenheimer, Bobby (October 2023, ACM Transactions on Applied Perception)

   As applications for virtual reality (VR) and augmented reality (AR) technology increase, it will be important to understand how users perceive their action capabilities in virtual environments. Feedback about actions may help to calibrate perception for action opportunities (affordances) so that action judgments in VR and AR mirror actors’ real abilities. Previous work indicates that walking through a virtual doorway while wielding an object can calibrate the perception of one’s passability through feedback from collisions. In the current study, we aimed to replicate this calibration through feedback using a different paradigm in VR while also testing whether this calibration transfers to AR. Participants held a pole at 45°and made passability judgments in AR (pretest phase). Then, they made passability judgments in VR and received feedback on those judgments by walking through a virtual doorway while holding the pole (calibration phase). Participants then returned to AR to make posttest passability judgments. Results indicate that feedback calibrated participants’ judgments in VR. Moreover, this calibration transferred to the AR environment. In other words, after experiencing feedback in VR, passability judgments in VR and in AR became closer to an actor’s actual ability, which could make training applications in these technologies more effective. 

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2. Adaptation in Virtual worlds

   https://doi.org/10.19229/978-88-5509-096-4/392020  

   Guathier, Jean-Marc (May 2020, Resilience between Mitigation and Adaptation)

   In collaboration with scientists, engineers, sociologists and designers, we have developed virtual worlds for the visualization and interaction with dynamic systems. This allows participants to interact with three-dimensional structures that constantly change and adapt through time. Participants can use simple building blocks to manipulate three-dimensional structures in real-time, allowing them to interact with systems that constantly change and adapt over time. This paper analyses the source and role of change in dynamic systems using virtual reality; particularly the role of constraints and transformations that can generate real-time adaptations of a virtual system. We propose a new design process that allows participants to collaborate with virtual agents. The goal of this process is to create accurate dynamic three-dimensional systems that can self-adapt under constraints and evolve into new spatial configurations as a result of adaptation. The collaboration between participants and virtual agents offers new perspectives on user interaction, dynamic three-dimensional manipulations and about the evolution of a virtual architecture inside a virtual world. 

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3. Virtual Ability Simulation: Applying Rotational Gain to the Leg to Increase Confidence During Physical Rehabilitation

   https://doi.org/10.2312/egve.20191282  

   Chowdhury, T.; Ferdous, S.; Peck, T.; Quarles, J. (September 2019, ICAT-EGVE 2019 - International Conference on Artificial Reality and Telexistence and Eurographics Symposium on Virtual Environments)

   This paper investigates a concept called Virtual Ability Simulation (VAS) for people with disability due to Multiple Sclerosis (MS), in a virtual reality (VR) environment. In a VAS people with a disability perform tasks that are made easier in the virtual environment (VE) compared to the real world. We hypothesized that putting people with disabilities in a VAS will increase confidence and enable more efficient task completion. To investigate this hypothesis, we conducted a within-subjects experiment in which participants performed a virtual task called ''kick the ball'' in two different conditions: a no gain condition (i.e., same difficulty as in the real world) and a rotational gain condition (i.e., physically easier than the real world but visually the same). The results from our study suggest that VAS increased participants' confidence which in turn enables them to perceive the difficulty of the same task easier. 

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4. Over My Hand: Using a Personalized Hand in VR to Improve Object Size Estimation, Body Ownership, and Presence

   https://doi.org/10.1145/3267782.3267920  

   Jung, Sungchul; Bruder, Gerd; Wisniewski, Pamela J.; Sandor, Christian; Hughes, Charles E. (January 2018, . Proceedings of the 6th ACM Symposium on Spatial User Interaction (SUI 2018))

   Best Paper Award. When estimating the distance or size of an object in the real world, we often use our own body as a metric; this strategy is called body-based scaling. However, object size estimation in a virtual environment presented via a head-mounted display differs from the physical world due to technical limitations such as narrow field of view and low fidelity of the virtual body when compared to one's real body. In this paper, we focus on increasing the fidelity of a participant's body representation in virtual environments with a personalized hand using personalized characteristics and a visually faithful augmented virtuality approach. To investigate the impact of the personalized hand, we compared it against a generic virtual hand and measured effects on virtual body ownership, spatial presence, and object size estimation. Specifically, we asked participants to perform a perceptual matching task that was based on scaling a virtual box on a table in front of them. Our results show that the personalized hand not only increased virtual body ownership and spatial presence, but also supported participants in correctly estimating the size of a virtual object in the proximity of their hand. 

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5. Perception of Spatial Relationships in Impossible Spaces

   Robb, A; Barwulor, C (October 2019, ACM Symposium on Applied Perception)

   Impossible spaces have been used to increase the amount of virtual space available for real walking within a constrained physical space. In this technique, multiple virtual rooms are allowed to occupy overlapping portions of the physical space, in a way which is not possible in real euclidean space. Prior work has explored detection thresholds for impossible spaces, however very little work has considered other aspects of how impossible spaces alter participants' perception of spatial relationships within virtual environments. In this paper, we present a within-subjects study $(n=30)$ investigating how impossible spaces altered participants perceptions of the location of objects placed in different rooms. Participants explored three layouts with varying amounts of overlap between rooms and then pointed in the direction of various objects they had been tasked to locate. Significantly more error was observed when pointing at objects in overlapping spaces as compared to the non-overlapping layout. Further analysis suggests that participants pointed towards where objects would be located in the non-overlapping layout, regardless of how much overlap was present. This suggests that, when participants are not aware that any manipulation is present, they automatically adapt their representation of the spaces based on judgments of relative size and visible constraints on the size of the whole system. 

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