Immersive Process Model Exploration in Virtual Reality

Design and Evaluation of a Wearable Fingertip Device for Three-Dimensional Skin-Slip Display

Skin-slip provides crucial cues about the interaction state and surface properties. Currently, most skin-slip devices focus on two-dimensional tactile slip display and have limitations when displaying surface properties like bumps and contours. In this article, a wearable fingertip device with a simple, effective, and low-cost design for three-dimensional skin-slip display is proposed. Continuous multi-directional skin-slip and normal indentation are combined to convey the sensation of three-dimensional geometric properties in virtual reality during active finger exploration. The device has a tactile belt, a five-bar mechanism, and four motors. Cooperating with the angle-mapping strategy, two micro DC motors are used to transmit continuous multi-directional skin-slip. Two servo motors are used to drive the five-bar mechanism to provide normal indentation. The characteristics of the device were obtained through the bench tests. Three experiments were designed and sequentially conducted to evaluate the performance of the device in three-dimensional surface exploration. The experimental results suggested that this device could effectively transmit continuous multi-directional skin-slip sensations, convey different bumps, and display surface contours.

Design and evaluation of a collaborative UML modeling environment in virtual reality

Modeling is a key activity in conceptual design and system design. Through collaborative modeling, end-users, stakeholders, experts, and entrepreneurs are able to create a shared understanding of a system representation. While the Unified Modeling Language (UML) is one of the major conceptual modeling languages in object-oriented software engineering, more and more concerns arise from the modeling quality of UML and its tool-support. Among them, the limitation of the two-dimensional presentation of its notations and lack of natural collaborative modeling tools are reported to be significant. In this paper, we explore the potential of using virtual reality (VR) technology for collaborative UML software design by comparing it with classical collaborative software design using conventional devices (desktop PC/laptop). For this purpose, we have developed a VR modeling environment that offers a natural collaborative modeling experience for UML Class Diagrams. Based on a user study with 24 participants, we have compared collaborative VR modeling with conventional modeling with regard to efficiency, effectiveness, and user satisfaction. Results show that the use of VR has some disadvantages concerning efficiency and effectiveness, but the user's fun, the feeling of being in the same room with a remote collaborator, and the naturalness of collaboration were increased.

Advantages of virtual reality for the participative design of work processes: An integrative perspective

BACKGROUND: The participative design of work processes is hampered by as-yet unresolved challenges. A root cause is seen in high information-pass-on-barriers. Virtual Reality (VR) may have a significant potential to overcome these challenges. Yet, there is no systematic understanding of which advantages provided by VR can support the participative design of work processes. OBJECTIVE: The present study aims to assess the potential of VR to support the participative design of work processes by conducting an integrative literature review identifying the advantages of VR in general work contexts and mapping them to known challenges in participative design of work processes. METHODS: The integrative literature review was conducted based on 268 sources of which 52 were considered for an in-depth analysis of the advantages offered by VR. RESULTS: The resulting conceptual framework consisted of 13 characteristic-related advantages (e.g., immersion, interactivity, flexibility) and 10 effect-related advantages (e.g., attractivity, involvement, cost efficiency) which readily address known challenges in the participative design of work processes. CONCLUSION: Mapping the advantages of VR to the challenges in participative design of work processes revealed a substantial potential of VR to overcome high information-pass-on-barriers. As such, employing VR in work process design initiatives represents a fruitful avenue for the promotion of prevention and employee health.

The Value of Immersive Visualization

In recent years, research on immersive environments has experienced a new wave of interest, and immersive analytics has been established as a new research field. Every year, a vast amount of different techniques, applications, and user studies are published that focus on employing immersive environments for visualizing and analyzing data. Nevertheless, immersive analytics is still a relatively unexplored field that needs more basic research in many aspects and is still viewed with skepticism. Rightly so, because in our opinion, many researchers do not fully exploit the possibilities offered by immersive environments and, on the contrary, sometimes even overestimate the power of immersive visualizations. Although a growing body of papers has demonstrated individual advantages of immersive analytics for specific tasks and problems, the general benefit of using immersive environments for effective analytic tasks remains controversial. In this article, we reflect on when and how immersion may be appropriate for the analysis and present four guiding scenarios. We report on our experiences, discuss the landscape of assessment strategies, and point out the directions where we believe immersive visualizations have the greatest potential.

Combining Dynamic Passive Haptics and Haptic Retargeting for Enhanced Haptic Feedback in Virtual Reality

To provide immersive haptic experiences, proxy-based haptic feedback systems for virtual reality (VR) face two central challenges: (1) similarity, and (2) colocation. While to solve challenge (1), physical proxy objects need to be sufficiently similar to their virtual counterparts in terms of haptic properties, for challenge (2), proxies and virtual counterparts need to be sufficiently colocated to allow for seamless interactions. To solve these challenges, past research introduced, among others, two successful techniques: (a) Dynamic Passive Haptic Feedback (DPHF), a hardware-based technique that leverages actuated props adapting their physical state during the VR experience, and (b) Haptic Retargeting, a software-based technique leveraging hand redirection to bridge spatial offsets between real and virtual objects. Both concepts have, up to now, not ever been studied in combination. This paper proposes to combine both techniques and reports on the results of a perceptual and a psychophysical experiment situated in a proof-of-concept scenario focused on the perception of virtual weight distribution. We show that users in VR overestimate weight shifts and that, when DPHF and HR are combined, significantly greater shifts can be rendered, compared to using only a weight-shifting prop or unnoticeable hand redirection. Moreover, we find the combination of DPHF and HR to let significantly larger spatial dislocations of proxy and virtual counterpart go unnoticed by users. Our investigation is the first to show the value of combining DPHF and HR in practice, validating that their combination can better solve the challenges of similarity and colocation than the individual techniques can do alone.