scholarly journals Social distance: a comparison between the screen and virtual environments

2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Marcos Emanoel Pereira ◽  
Elza Maria Techio ◽  
José Luís Álvaro ◽  
Benvindo Maloa ◽  
Carina Feitosa ◽  
...  
Keyword(s):  
Data Collection ◽  
Response Time ◽  
Virtual Environments ◽  
Virtual Environment ◽  
Social Distance ◽  
Skin Color ◽  
Social Groups ◽  
Image Size ◽  
Indirect Measure ◽  
Indirect Measures

Social distance is one of the indicators of intergroup relations. It expresses the degree of intimacy, proximity or distance in relation to the members of specific social groups, making the concept an indirect form of referring to prejudice. The present study described in this article aims to evaluate the protocol for the use of an indirect measure of social distance, implemented by computers and specialized devices. We sought to assess the potential of the technique of virtual reality as a criterion for estimating social distance by comparing the results obtained in the virtual environment with the correlated measures obtained in a computer screen. This is an experimental study, developed to evaluate the pleasantness of four photographs and the registry of two classes of indirect measures. Social distance was chosen to evaluate the photographs and the response time was used to choose the estimate, in two modalities of data collection, one in a screen environment and the other in the virtual environment, in Brazil and Mozambique. A total of 150 university students participated in the study, 87 from Brazil and 61 from Mozambique. In the study, we show that the estimate for social distance is more associated with the response time than the attractiveness of the image, regardless of the country. When we introduce in the predictive models the variables sex and skin color of the individuals portrayed in the photographs, we note that the models obtained in the virtual environment present better indicators than those obtained in the screen, except for the predictive model for the evaluation of the distance of the Black woman portrait. The response time proved to be much more central in the model than the attractiveness of the image. In the screen environment, the increase in the image size was connected to the greater amount of time spent in decision-making while in the virtual environment the distancing from the image was connected to a greater amount of time spent making a decision. The country of origin had little influence over the final models. In conclusion, we may highlight that the effects of social distance, the response time and the attractiveness of the image were greater in the virtual environment, which inspires us to highlight the importance of using more sophisticated data collection procedures through the use of information technology.

scholarly journals Perceptual uncertainty and action consequences independently affect hand movements in a virtual environment

2020 ◽  
Vol 10 (1) ◽  
Author(s):  
Martin Giesel ◽  
Anna Nowakowska ◽  
Julie M. Harris ◽  
Constanze Hesse
Keyword(s):  
Virtual Environments ◽  
Virtual Environment ◽  
Motor Skills ◽  
Hand Movements ◽  
Perceptual Information ◽  
Avoidance Task ◽  
Natural Environments ◽  
Motor Behaviour ◽  
Virtual And Augmented Reality

AbstractWhen we use virtual and augmented reality (VR/AR) environments to investigate behaviour or train motor skills, we expect that the insights or skills acquired in VR/AR transfer to real-world settings. Motor behaviour is strongly influenced by perceptual uncertainty and the expected consequences of actions. VR/AR differ in both of these aspects from natural environments. Perceptual information in VR/AR is less reliable than in natural environments, and the knowledge of acting in a virtual environment might modulate our expectations of action consequences. Using mirror reflections to create a virtual environment free of perceptual artefacts, we show that hand movements in an obstacle avoidance task systematically differed between real and virtual obstacles and that these behavioural differences occurred independent of the quality of the available perceptual information. This suggests that even when perceptual correspondence between natural and virtual environments is achieved, action correspondence does not necessarily follow due to the disparity in the expected consequences of actions in the two environments.

Dropouts and Aftereffects: Examining General Accessibility to Virtual Environment Technology

2002 ◽  
Vol 46 (26) ◽  
pp. 2114-2118 ◽  
Author(s):  
Kay M. Stanney ◽  
Kelly S. Kingdon ◽  
Robert S. Kennedy
Keyword(s):  
Virtual Environments ◽  
Virtual Environment ◽  
Broad Spectrum ◽  
General Public ◽  
Dropout Rates ◽  
Environment Exposure ◽  
Oculomotor Disturbances ◽  
A Minor

Are current virtual environments (VEs) usable by the broad spectrum of people who may wish to utilize this technology? The current study, which examined over 1000 participants, indicates the answer to this question is a definitive ‘no’. Virtual environment exposure was found to cause people to vomit (1.1%), experience nausea (71%), disorientation (70%), and oculomotor disturbances (79%). Overall, 88% of participants reported some level of adverse symptomatology, ranging from a minor headache to vomiting and intense vertigo. These disturbances led 12% of those exposed to prematurely cease their interaction. Dropout rates as high as nearly 50% were found in exposures of 1 hr in length. In addition, long-term aftereffects were found, including headaches, drowsiness, nausea, and fatigue. These problems could substantially reduce the accessibility of VE technology by the general public and thus must be resolved if this technology is to be widely adopted.

The VEOS Project

1994 ◽  
Vol 3 (2) ◽  
pp. 111-129 ◽  
Author(s):  
William Bricken ◽  
Geoffrey Coco
Keyword(s):  
Rapid Prototyping ◽  
Virtual Environments ◽  
Virtual Environment ◽  
Object Oriented ◽  
Organization Structure ◽  
Object Oriented Programming ◽  
Iterative Refinement ◽  
Software Infrastructure ◽  
Human Interface ◽  
Heterogeneous Distributed Computing

The Virtual Environment Operating Shell (veos) was developed at University of Washington's Human Interface Technology Laboratory as software infrastructure for the lab's research in virtual environments. veos was designed from scratch to provide a comprehensive and unified management facility to support generation of, interaction with, and maintenance of virtual environments. VEOS emphasizes rapid prototyping, heterogeneous distributed computing, and portability. We discuss the design, philosophy and implementation of veos in depth. Within the Kernel, the shared database transformations are pattern-directed, communications are asynchronous, and the programmer's interface is LISP. An entity-based metaphor extends object-oriented programming to systems-oriented programming. Entities provide first-class environments and biological programming constructs such as perceive, react, and persist. The organization, structure, and programming of entities are discussed in detail. The article concludes with a description of the applications that have contributed to the iterative refinement of the VEOS software.

Semantic and Phonological Encoding in Adults Who Stutter: Silent Responses to Pictorial Stimuli

2017 ◽  
Vol 60 (9) ◽  
pp. 2537-2550 ◽  
Author(s):  
Irena Vincent
Keyword(s):  
Response Time ◽  
Identification Accuracy ◽  
Phonological Encoding ◽  
Vowel Identification ◽  
Pictorial Stimuli ◽  
Indirect Measures ◽  
Semantic Encoding ◽  
Adults Who Stutter ◽  
Encoding Efficiency ◽  
Phoneme Identification

Purpose Research on language planning in adult stuttering is relatively sparse and offers diverging arguments about a potential causative relationship between semantic and phonological encoding and fluency breakdowns. This study further investigated semantic and phonological encoding efficiency in adults who stutter (AWS) by means of silent category and phoneme identification, respectively. Method Fifteen AWS and 15 age- and sex-matched adults who do not stutter (ANS) participated. The groups were compared on the basis of the accuracy and speed of superordinate category (animal vs. object) and initial phoneme (vowel vs. consonant) decisions, which were indicated manually during silent viewing of pictorial stimuli. Movement execution latency was accounted for, and no other cognitive, linguistic, or motor demands were posed on participants' responses. Therefore, category identification accuracy and speed were considered indirect measures of semantic encoding efficiency and phoneme identification accuracy and speed of phonological encoding efficiency. Results For category decisions, AWS were slower but not less accurate than ANS, with objects eliciting more errors and slower responses than animals in both groups. For phoneme decisions, the groups did not differ in accuracy, with consonant errors outnumbering vowel errors in both groups, and AWS were slower than ANS in consonant but not vowel identification, with consonant response time lagging behind vowel response time in AWS only. Conclusions AWS were less efficient than ANS in semantic encoding, and they might harbor a consonant-specific phonological encoding weakness. Future independent studies are warranted to discover if these positive findings are replicable and a marker for persistent stuttering.

scholarly journals Crowd behaviour during high-stress evacuations in an immersive virtual environment

2016 ◽  
Vol 13 (122) ◽  
pp. 20160414 ◽  
Author(s):  
Mehdi Moussaïd ◽  
Mubbasir Kapadia ◽  
Tyler Thrash ◽  
Robert W. Sumner ◽  
Markus Gross ◽  
...  
Keyword(s):  
Virtual Environments ◽  
Virtual Environment ◽  
Human Subjects ◽  
High Stress ◽  
Three Dimensional ◽  
Real Life ◽  
Social Conventions ◽  
Emergency Situations ◽  
Crowd Behaviour ◽  
The Individual

Understanding the collective dynamics of crowd movements during stressful emergency situations is central to reducing the risk of deadly crowd disasters. Yet, their systematic experimental study remains a challenging open problem due to ethical and methodological constraints. In this paper, we demonstrate the viability of shared three-dimensional virtual environments as an experimental platform for conducting crowd experiments with real people. In particular, we show that crowds of real human subjects moving and interacting in an immersive three-dimensional virtual environment exhibit typical patterns of real crowds as observed in real-life crowded situations. These include the manifestation of social conventions and the emergence of self-organized patterns during egress scenarios. High-stress evacuation experiments conducted in this virtual environment reveal movements characterized by mass herding and dangerous overcrowding as they occur in crowd disasters. We describe the behavioural mechanisms at play under such extreme conditions and identify critical zones where overcrowding may occur. Furthermore, we show that herding spontaneously emerges from a density effect without the need to assume an increase of the individual tendency to imitate peers. Our experiments reveal the promise of immersive virtual environments as an ethical, cost-efficient, yet accurate platform for exploring crowd behaviour in high-risk situations with real human subjects.

scholarly journals A Sampling-Agnostic Software Framework for Converting Between Texture Map Representations of Virtual Environments

2017 ◽  
Vol 122 ◽  
Author(s):  
Vinay K Sriram ◽  
Wesley Griffin
Keyword(s):  
Virtual Environments ◽  
Image Quality Assessment ◽  
Sampling Techniques ◽  
Mathematical Framework ◽  
Image Size ◽  
Uniform Sampling ◽  
Octahedral Environment ◽  
Image Width ◽  
Assessment Metrics ◽  
Environment Maps

We have developed a utility to both stitch cube maps into other types of texture maps (equirectangular,dual paraboloid, and octahedral), and stitch those other types back into cube maps. The utility allows for flexibility in the image size of the conversion - the user can specify the desired image width, and the height is computed (cube, paraboloid, and octahedral mappings are square, and spherical maps are generated to have 16:9 aspect ratio). Moreover, the utility is sampling-agnostic, so the user can select whether to use uniform or jittered sampling over the pixels, as well as the number of samples to use per pixel. The rest of this paper discusses the mathematical framework for projecting from cube maps to equirectangular, dual paraboloid, and octahedral environment maps, as well as the mathematical framework for the inverse projections. We also describe two sampling techniques: uniform sampling and correlated multi-jittered sampling. We perform an evaluation of the sampling techniques and a comparative analysis of the different projections using objective image quality assessment metrics.

Don't Take Touch for Granted: An Interview with Susan Lederman

1998 ◽  
Vol 25 (1) ◽  
pp. 64-67 ◽  
Author(s):  
René Verry
Keyword(s):  
Artificial Intelligence ◽  
Motor Control ◽  
Virtual Environments ◽  
Virtual Environment ◽  
Haptic Perception ◽  
Information Science ◽  
Haptic Interfaces ◽  
Annual Symposium ◽  
International Council ◽  
Canadian Institute

Susan Lederman (SL) is an invited member of the International Council of Research Fellows for the Braille Research Center and a Fellow of he Canadian Psychology Association. She was also an Associate of the Canadian Institute for Advanced Research in the Robotics and Artificial Intelligence Programme for 8 years. A Professor in the Departments of Psychology and Computing & Information Science at Queen's University at Kingston (Ontario, Canada), she has written and coauthored numerous articles on tactile psychophysics, haptic perception and cognition, motor control, and haptic applications in robotics, teleoperation, and virtual environments. She is currently the coorganizer of the Annual Symposium a Haptic Interfaces for Teleoperation and Virtual Environment Systems. René Verry (RV) is a psychology professor at Millikin University (Decatur, IL), where she teaches a variety of courses in the experimental core, including Sensation and Perception. She chose the often-subordinated somatic senses as the focus of her interview, and recruited Susan Lederman as our research specialist.

Me and My VE, Part 5: Applications in Human Factors Research and Practice

2018 ◽  
Vol 62 (1) ◽  
pp. 2051-2055
Author(s):  
Randall Spain ◽  
Benjamin Goldberg ◽  
Jeffrey Hansberger ◽  
Tami Griffith ◽  
Jeremy Flynn ◽  
...  
Keyword(s):  
Virtual Reality ◽  
Human Factors ◽  
Virtual Environments ◽  
Virtual Environment ◽  
Human Performance ◽  
Mixed Reality ◽  
Research Training ◽  
Research And Practice ◽  
Set Up ◽  
Human Factors Research

Recent advances in technology have made virtual environments, virtual reality, augmented reality, and simulations more affordable and accessible to researchers, companies, and the general public, which has led to many novel use cases and applications. A key objective of human factors research and practice is determining how these technology-rich applications can be designed and applied to improve human performance across a variety of contexts. This session will demonstrate some of the distinct and diverse uses of virtual environments and mixed reality environments in an alternative format. The session will begin with each demonstrator providing a brief overview of their virtual environment (VE) and a description of how it has been used to address a particular problem or research need. Following the description portion of the session, each VE will be set-up at a demonstration station in the room, and session attendees will be encouraged to directly interact with the virtual environment and ask demonstrators questions about their research and inquire about the effectiveness of using VE for research, training, and evaluation purposes. The overall objective of this alternative session is to increase the awareness of how human factors professionals use VE technologies and increase the awareness of the capabilities and limitations of VE in supporting the work of HF professionals.

scholarly journals VIRTUAL REALITY SIMULATION AS THERAPY FOR POSTTRAUMATIC STRESS DISORDER (PTSD)

2019 ◽  
Vol 01 (01) ◽  
pp. 24-34 ◽  
Author(s):  
Smys S ◽  
Jennifer S. Raj ◽  
Krishna raj N.
Keyword(s):  
Posttraumatic Stress Disorder ◽  
Sexual Abuse ◽  
Virtual Reality ◽  
Virtual Environments ◽  
Virtual Environment ◽  
Stress Disorder ◽  
Raspberry Pi ◽  
Virtual Reality Simulation ◽  
Motion Platform ◽  
Person Experience

Virtual reality (VR) technology has the potential to make a person experience anything, anytime, anywhere. It has the ability to influence the human brain that it assumes to be present somewhere that it is really not. In this paper, we exploit this application of the VR technology to simulate virtual environments that can help with PTSD therapy for people affected by trauma due to accident, war, sexual abuse and so on. Several sensors are used to gather the user movements on a motion platform and replicate it in the virtual environment with the help of a Raspberry Pi board and Unreal Developer’s kit. It has flexible interfaces that the clinician can modify the virtual environment according to the requirement for the patient.

scholarly journals Virtual Reality and Assistive Technologies: A Survey

2018 ◽  
Vol 18 (2) ◽  
pp. 30-57
Author(s):  
Shamima Yasmin
Keyword(s):  
Virtual Reality ◽  
Virtual Environments ◽  
Virtual Environment ◽  
Assistive Technologies ◽  
Sensory Substitution ◽  
Body Movements ◽  
Rehabilitation Therapy ◽  
Extensive Survey ◽  
Different Types ◽  
Mental Exercise

This paper conducts an extensive survey on existing Virtual Reality (VR)-based rehabilitation approaches in the context of different types of impairments: mobility, cognitive, and visual. Some VR-based assistive technologies involve repetitions of body movements, some require persistent mental exercise, while some work as sensory substitution systems. A multi-modal VR-based environment can incorporate a number of senses, (i.e., visual, auditory, or haptic) into the system and can be an immense source of motivation and engagement in comparison with traditional rehabilitation therapy. This survey categorizes virtual environments on the basis of different available modalities. Each category is again subcategorized by the types of impairments while introducing available devices and interfaces. Before concluding the survey, the paper also briefly focuses on some issues with existing VR-based approaches that need to be optimized to exploit the utmost benefit of virtual environment-based rehabilitation systems .

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