This paper reviews the concepts of immersion and presence in virtual environments VEs. We propose that the degree of immersion can be objectively assessed as the characteristics of a technology, and has dimensions such as the extent to which a display system can deliver an inclusive, extensive, surrounding, and vivid illusion of virtual environment to a participant. Other dimensions of immersion are concerned with the extent of body matching, and the extent to which there is a self-contained plot in which the participant can act and in which there is an autonomous response. Presence is a state of consciousness that may be concomitant with immersion, and is related to a sense of being in a place. Presence governs aspects of autonomie responses and higher-level behaviors of a participant in a VE. The paper considers single and multiparticipant shared environments, and draws on the experience of ComputerSupported Cooperative Working CSCW research as a guide to understanding presence in shared environments. The paper finally outlines the aims of the FIVE Working Group, and the 1995 FIVE Conference in London, UK.

A framework for immersive virtual environments five: Speculations on the role of presence in virtual environments

We are on the verge of ubiquitously adopting Augmented Reality (AR) technologies to enhance our percep- tion and help us see, hear, and feel our environments in new and enriched ways. AR will support us in fields such as education, maintenance, design and reconnaissance, to name but a few. This paper describes the field of AR, including a brief definition and development history, the enabling technologies and their characteristics. It surveys the state of the art by reviewing some recent applications of AR technology as well as some known limitations regarding human factors in the use of AR systems that developers will need to overcome.

/pdf/a-survey-of-augmented-reality-technologies-applications-and-3d9hf1tnc4.pdf

A Survey of Augmented Reality Technologies, Applications and Limitations

There have been few attempts to introduce frameworks that can help support tutors evaluate educational games and simulations that can be most effective in their particular learning context and subject area. The lack of a dedicated framework has produced a significant impediment for the uptake of games and simulations particularly in formal learning contexts. This paper addresses this shortcoming by introducing a four-dimensional framework for helping tutors to evaluate the potential of using games- and simulation-based learning in their practice, and to support more critical approaches to this form of games and simulations. The four-dimensional framework is applied to two examples from practice to test its efficacy and structure critical reflection upon practice.

/pdf/how-can-exploratory-learning-with-games-and-simulations-17elj6h6n1.pdf

How can exploratory learning with games and simulations within the curriculum be most effectively evaluated

A critical review of virtual and augmented reality (VR/AR) applications in construction safety

http://www.unfoldingleadership.com/downloads/MagicBook.pdf

The MagicBook: a transitional AR interface

We propose an approach to creating shared mixed realities based on the construction of transparent boundaries between real and virtual spaces. First, we introduce a taxonomy that classifies current approaches to shared spaces according to the three dimensions of transportation, artificiality, and spatiality. Second, we discuss our experience of staging a poetry performance simultaneously within real and virtual theaters. This demonstrates the complexities involved in establishing social interaction between real and virtual spaces and motivates the development of a systematic approach to mixing realities. Third, we introduce and demonstrate the technique of mixed-reality boundaries as a way of joining real and virtual spaces together in order to address some of these problems.

/pdf/understanding-and-constructing-shared-spaces-with-mixed-2somw1l1lf.pdf

Understanding and constructing shared spaces with mixed-reality boundaries

We present a virtual reality application called VR-VIBE which is intended to support the co-operative browsing and filtering of large document stores. VR-VIBE extends a visualisation approach proposed in a previous two dimensional system called VIBE into three dimensions, allowing more information to be visualised at one time and supporting more powerful styles of interaction, The essence of VR-VIBE is that multiple users can explore the results of applying several simultaneous queries to a corpus of documents. By arranging the queries into a spatial framework, the system shows the relative attraction of each document to each query by its spatial position and also shows the absolute relevance of each document to all of the queries. Users may then navigate the space, select individual documents, control the display according to a dynamic relevance threshold and dynamically drag the queries to new positions to see the effect on the document space. Co-operative browsing is supported by directly embodying users and providing them with the ability to interact over live audio connections and to attach brief textual annotations to individual documents. Finally, we conclude with some initial observations gleaned from our experience of constructing VR-VIBE and using it in the laboratory setting.

VR-VIBE: A Virtual Environment for Co-operative Information Retrieval

We begin by reviewing current spatial approaches to CSCW (mediaspaces, spatial video conferencing, collaborative virtual environments and telepresence applications) and classifying them along the proposed dimensions of transportation, artificiality and spatiality. This classification leads us to identify new shared space applications; so called mixed realities. We present an example of a mixed reality called the Internet Foyer, an application which provides a unified entry point into an organisation's physical and electronic environments and which supports awareness and chance encounters between the occupants of physical and synthetic space.

Shared spaces: transportation, artificiality, and spatiality

This paper presents new services for accessing, exploring and collaborating via the World Wide Web. These are based on the use of Collaborative Virtual Environment (CVE) technology which is used to create navigable 3-D graphical, textual, audio and video representations of the structure of the Web and also of its users. The paper describes a number of different services which address the issues of: browsing the Web; searching the Web; directly representing the presence of other users on the Web and enabling communication with them; and finally new forms of interface to the Web, based on the notion of “mixed realities” which are used to create new forms of boundary between physical and virtual spaces.

Visualising and populating the Web: Collaborative virtual environments for browsing, searching and inhabiting Webspace

This paper describes an ongoing project in the UK to establish a framework for distributed virtual reality applications The paper describes the aims of the project, the three applications (physics teaching, collaborative information browsing, and geometric design), the methodology for evaluation, and the network infrastructure

Chris Brown

Papers

Understanding and constructing shared spaces with mixed-reality boundaries

VR-VIBE: A Virtual Environment for Co-operative Information Retrieval

Shared spaces: transportation, artificiality, and spatiality

Visualising and populating the Web: Collaborative virtual environments for browsing, searching and inhabiting Webspace

Distributed Extensible Virtual Reality Laboratory (DEVRL)