The recent appearance of low cost Virtual Reality (VR) technologies – like the Oculus Rift, the HTC Vive and the Sony PlayStation VR – and Mixed Reality Interfaces (MRITF) – like the Hololens – is attracting the attention of users and researchers suggesting it may be the next largest stepping stone in technological innovation. However, the history of VR technology is longer than it may seem: the concept of VR was formulated in the 1960s and the first commercial VR tools appeared in the late 1980s. For this reason, during the last twentyyears, hundreds of researchers explored the processes, effects and applications of this technology producing thousands of scientific papers. What is the outcome of this significant research work? This paper wants to provide an answer to this question by exploring, using advanced scientometric techniques, the existing research corpus in the field. We collected all the existent articles about VR in the Web of Science Core Collection scientific database, and the resultant dataset contained 21,667 records for VR and 9,944 for AR. The bibliographic record contained various fields, such as author, title, abstract, country, and all the references (needed for the citation analysis). The network and cluster analysis of the literature showed a composite panorama characterized by evolutions over the time. Indeed, whether until five years ago, the main publication media on VR concerned both conference proceeding and journals, more recently journals constitute the main medium. Similarly, if at first computer science was the leading research field, nowadays clinical areas increased, as well as the number of countries involved in virtual reality research. The present work discusses the evolution of the use of virtual reality in the main areas of application with an emphasis on the future expected virtual reality’s capacities, increases and challenges. We conclude considering the disruptive contribution that VR/AR/MRITF will be able to get in scientific fields, as well in human communication and interaction, as already happened with the advent of mobile phones by increasing the use and the development of scientific applications (e.g. in clinical areas) and by modifying the social communication and interaction among people.

/pdf/the-past-present-and-future-of-virtual-and-augmented-reality-1qmnxew4eq.pdf

The Past, Present, and Future of Virtual and Augmented Reality Research: A Network and Cluster Analysis of the Literature

Technology in education can influence students to learn actively and can motivate them, leading to an effective process of learning Previous research has identified the problem that technology will create a passive learning process if the technology used does not promote critical thinking, meaning-making or metacognition Since its introduction, augmented reality (AR) has been shown to have good potential in making the learning process more active, effective and meaningful This is because its advanced technology enables users to interact with virtual and real-time applications and brings the natural experiences to the user In addition, the merging of AR with education has recently attracted research attention because of its ability to allow students to be immersed in realistic experiences Therefore, this concept paper reviews the research that has been conducted on AR The review describes the application of AR in a number of fields of learning including Medicine, Chemistry, Mathematics, Physics, Geography, Biology, Astronomy and History This paper also discusses the advantages of AR compared to traditional technology (such as e-learning and courseware) and traditional teaching methods (chalk and talk and traditional books) The review of the results of the research shows that, overall, AR technologies have a positive potential and advantages that can be adapted in education The review also indicates the limitations of AR which could be addressed in future research

/pdf/a-review-of-research-on-augmented-reality-in-education-4rv3v2oxjm.pdf

A review of research on augmented reality in education: Advantages and applications

The use of Augmented Reality (AR) to achieve educational inclusion has been not deeply explored. This systematic review describes the current state of using AR as an educational technology that takes into consideration the needs of all students including those with a disability. It is done through the analysis of factors, such as the advantages of AR, its limitations, uses, challenges, its scope in the educational field, the attended population and the positive or negative effects of its use in learning scenarios that involve students with diverse educational needs. A total of 50 studies between 2008 and 2018 were analyzed through searching in three interdisciplinary databases: Scopus, Web of Science, and Springer link. For this, the methodological stages considered were planning the review, search, analysis of literature and results report. After analyzing the results, it was possible to demonstrate that the use of AR for inclusive education in the field of sciences is where more studies have been conducted. In regard to the population with disabilities, among the most representative advantages reported were the motivation, interaction and generating interest on the part of the student. At the same time, an important methodological limitation identified was the size of the sample; some investigations were done with two or three subjects, some studies Single Subject Designs were found. In terms of the population attended, the studies generally included students with different impairments (hearing, visual, motor or cognitive), minorities (ethnic, vulnerable), leaving aside other groups excluded as exceptional talents and immigrants, which could be explored in the future. Despite different problems to be addressed, few frameworks to the diversity attention in education were reported, and there was no model and methodology in inclusive education considered in the studies. Finally, from this review we have identified open issues that could give rise to new research in the subject of using AR to favor the creation of inclusive learning scenarios.

/pdf/augmented-reality-in-educational-inclusion-a-systematic-38nuiu41xk.pdf

Augmented Reality in Educational Inclusion. A Systematic Review on the Last Decade.

Augmented reality and virtual reality technologies are increasing in popularity. Augmented reality has thrived to date mainly on mobile applications, with games like Pokemon Go or the new Google Maps utility as some of its ambassadors. On the other hand, virtual reality has been popularized mainly thanks to the videogame industry and cheaper devices. However, what was initially a failure in the industrial field is resurfacing in recent years thanks to the technological improvements in devices and processing hardware. In this work, an in-depth study of the different fields in which augmented and virtual reality have been used has been carried out. This study focuses on conducting a thorough scoping review focused on these new technologies, where the evolution of each of them during the last years in the most important categories and in the countries most involved in these technologies will be analyzed. Finally, we will analyze the future trend of these technologies and the areas in which it is necessary to investigate to further integrate these technologies into society.

Augmented and Virtual Reality Evolution and Future Tendency

The aim of the study was to analyse learning using Augmented Reality (AR) technology and the motivational and cognitive aspects related to it in an informal learning context. The 146 participants w...

https://tandfonline.com/doi/pdf/10.1080/21548455.2016.1254358

Making the invisible observable by Augmented Reality in informal science education context

/pdf/mobile-augmented-reality-the-potential-for-education-21og9dir9j.pdf

Mobile Augmented Reality: The Potential for Education☆

—Digital medical image has a potential to be manipulated by unauthorized persons due to advanced communication technology. Verifying integrity and authenticity have become important issues on the medical image. This paper proposed a self-embedding watermark using a spiral block mapping for tamper detection and restoration. The block-based coding with the size of 3×3 was applied to perform self-embedding watermark with two authentication bits and seven recovery bits. The authentication bits are obtained from a set of condition between sub-block and block image, and the parity bits of each sub-block. The authentication bits and the recovery bits are embedded in the least significant bits using the proposed spiral block mapping. The recovery bits are embedded into different sub-blocks based on a spiral block mapping. The watermarked images were tested under various tampered images such as blurred image, unsharp-masking, copy-move, mosaic, noise, removal, and sharpening. The experimental results show that the scheme achieved a PSNR value of about 51.29 dB and a SSIM value of about 0.994 on the watermarked image. The scheme showed tamper localization with accuracy of 93.8%. In addition, the proposed scheme does not require external information to perform recovery bits. The proposed scheme was able to recover the tampered image with a PSNR value of 40.45 dB and a SSIM value of 0.994.

/pdf/three-layer-authentications-with-a-spiral-block-mapping-to-2oc0z74s.pdf

Danakorn Nincarean

Papers

Mobile Augmented Reality: The Potential for Education☆

Three Layer Authentications with a Spiral Block Mapping to Prove Authenticity in Medical Images