Virtual Reality and Human-Computer Interaction

A special issue of Applied Sciences (ISSN 2076-3417). This special issue belongs to the section "Computing and Artificial Intelligence".

Deadline for manuscript submissions: 20 August 2024 | Viewed by 2541

Special Issue Editors

Laboratory of Interactive Technologies, National Information Processing Institute, Warsaw, Poland
Interests: virtual reality; human–computer interaction; user experience design; accessibility; human–technology interaction
Instytut Psychologii Polskiej Akademii Nauk, Warsaw, Poland
Interests: augmented reality; semantics robotics; social psychology; human-robot interaction; computer games; virtual reality; video games; gaming games
XR Department and XR Lab, Polish-Japanese Academy of Information Technology, Warsaw, Poland
Interests: interaction usability; user experience; user studies; prototyping design; thinking creativity and innovation; rapid prototyping; applied artificial intelligence; software development
Institute of Applied Computer Science, Lodz University of Technology, Lodz, Poland
Interests: human-computer interaction; industrial tomography; crowdsourcing; so-called future-of-work and industry 4.0

Special Issue Information

Dear Colleagues,

We are excited to announce a Special Issue of the Applied Sciences journal on the topic of "Virtual Reality and Human–Computer Interaction". This Special Issue aims to showcase the latest research findings, developments, and ideas in the field, and I would like to invite authors to contribute their expertise.

Human–computer interaction (HCI) in virtual reality (VR) is becoming an important area of study in today's world, as VR has enabled the creation of novel experiences, training, simulations, and games. This Special Issue aims to explore the latest research findings in the area of HCI in VR, including novel interfaces, interaction techniques, and applications.

We welcome original research articles on topics such as novel interaction techniques for VR; HCI in VR for training and simulation; HCI for applications of VR in healthcare, education, and entertainment; accessibility in VR; user experience design for VR; and social, ethical and privacy issues related to VR.

Dr. Cezary Biele
Dr. Grzegorz Pochwatko
Dr. Wiesław Kopeć
Dr. Andrzej Romanowski
Guest Editors

Manuscript Submission Information

Manuscripts should be submitted online at www.mdpi.com by registering and logging in to this website. Once you are registered, click here to go to the submission form. Manuscripts can be submitted until the deadline. All submissions that pass pre-check are peer-reviewed. Accepted papers will be published continuously in the journal (as soon as accepted) and will be listed together on the special issue website. Research articles, review articles as well as short communications are invited. For planned papers, a title and short abstract (about 100 words) can be sent to the Editorial Office for announcement on this website.

Submitted manuscripts should not have been published previously, nor be under consideration for publication elsewhere (except conference proceedings papers). All manuscripts are thoroughly refereed through a single-blind peer-review process. A guide for authors and other relevant information for submission of manuscripts is available on the Instructions for Authors page. Applied Sciences is an international peer-reviewed open access semimonthly journal published by MDPI.

Please visit the Instructions for Authors page before submitting a manuscript. The Article Processing Charge (APC) for publication in this open access journal is 2400 CHF (Swiss Francs). Submitted papers should be well formatted and use good English. Authors may use MDPI's English editing service prior to publication or during author revisions.

Keywords

  • virtual reality
  • human–computer interaction
  • user experience design
  • accessibility
  • human–technology interaction

Published Papers (3 papers)

Order results
Result details
Select all
Export citation of selected articles as:

Research

26 pages, 6137 KiB  
Article
Impact of Latency on QoE, Performance, and Collaboration in Interactive Multi-User Virtual Reality
by Sam Van Damme, Javad Sameri, Susanna Schwarzmann, Qing Wei, Riccardo Trivisonno, Filip De Turck and Maria Torres Vega
Appl. Sci. 2024, 14(6), 2290; https://doi.org/10.3390/app14062290 - 08 Mar 2024
Viewed by 399
Abstract
Interactive, multi-user experiences are meant to define the present and future of Virtual Reality (VR). Such immersive experiences will typically consist of remote collaborations where content is streamed and/or synchronized over a network connection. Thus, real-time collaboration will be key. In this light, [...] Read more.
Interactive, multi-user experiences are meant to define the present and future of Virtual Reality (VR). Such immersive experiences will typically consist of remote collaborations where content is streamed and/or synchronized over a network connection. Thus, real-time collaboration will be key. In this light, the responsiveness of the system and the network will define the overall experience. As such, understanding the effect of network distortions, especially related to time delay, on end-user’s perception (in terms of Quality-of-Experience (QoE)), performance, and collaboration becomes crucial. The existing literature, however, has mostly focused on network requirements from a system point-of-view, where the key performance parameters are only provided in the form of Quality-of-Service (QoS) parameters (such as end-to-end latency). However, the translation of these network impairments to the end-user experience is often omitted. The purpose of this paper is to fill the gap by providing a thorough investigation of the impact of latency on the perception of users while performing collaborative tasks in multi-user VR. To this end, an experimental framework was designed, developed, and tested. It is based on a multi-device synchronizing architecture, enabling two simultaneous users to work together in a gamified virtual environment. The developed test environment also allows for the identification of the most prominent network requirements and objective analysis for each traffic link. To experimentally investigate the impact of latency on user perception, a user study was conducted. Participants were paired and asked to perform the collaborative task under different latency-prone scenarios. The results show that users are able to easily distinguish between distorted and non-distorted network configurations. However, making a distinction between different manifestations of latency is much less straightforward. Moreover, factors such as the user’s role in the experience and the required task, and the level of interactivity and movement have an important influence on the subjective level of perception, the strength of the user’s preferences, and the occurrence of cybersickness. In contrast, no significant differences in objective metrics, such as system performance and user completion time were observed. These results can support the creation of collective QoE metrics that model the group as a whole rather than each individual separately. As such, this work provides an important step to dynamically counteract any drops in group dynamics and performance by means of smart interventions in the transmission system and/or virtual environment. Full article
(This article belongs to the Special Issue Virtual Reality and Human-Computer Interaction)
Show Figures

Figure 1

22 pages, 2695 KiB  
Article
Design of Control Elements in Virtual Reality—Investigation of Factors Influencing Operating Efficiency, User Experience, Presence, and Workload
by Niels Hinricher, Chris Schröer and Claus Backhaus
Appl. Sci. 2023, 13(15), 8668; https://doi.org/10.3390/app13158668 - 27 Jul 2023
Viewed by 676
Abstract
Virtual reality (VR) enables prototypes of devices to be evaluated in a simulation of a future usage environment. A disadvantage is the insufficient feedback design during the interaction with prototypes. In this study, we investigated how virtual control elements in VR must be [...] Read more.
Virtual reality (VR) enables prototypes of devices to be evaluated in a simulation of a future usage environment. A disadvantage is the insufficient feedback design during the interaction with prototypes. In this study, we investigated how virtual control elements in VR must be designed to compensate for the lack of feedback. Therefore, 35 participants performed VR tasks using a virtual joystick and virtual rotary control. According to the design of experiments method, 12 factors, such as haptic feedback, sensitivity, size, and shape, were systematically varied. The control accuracy, task time, user experience, presence, and mental workload were recorded. The effect of a factor on the recorded parameters was examined using multifactorial ANOVA. Linear regression was used to calculate the mathematical models between the factors and parameters. These models were used to calculate the optimal design of the control elements in the VR. For rotary control, eight factors had a significant influence on the recorded parameters. There were seven factors for the joystick. With mathematical models, optimized control element designs for VR were calculated for the first time. These findings can help to better adapt prototypes and human–machine interfaces to different modalities in VR. Full article
(This article belongs to the Special Issue Virtual Reality and Human-Computer Interaction)
Show Figures

Figure 1

15 pages, 2585 KiB  
Article
Virtual Reality Collision Detection Based on Improved Ant Colony Algorithm
by Peng Xu and Qingyun Sun
Appl. Sci. 2023, 13(11), 6366; https://doi.org/10.3390/app13116366 - 23 May 2023
Viewed by 891
Abstract
In order to improve the performance in terms of detecting objects colliding in virtual reality, the ant colony algorithm was used to detect collisions. In the preliminary detection stage, the OBB bounding box and the spherical bounding box were used to detect the [...] Read more.
In order to improve the performance in terms of detecting objects colliding in virtual reality, the ant colony algorithm was used to detect collisions. In the preliminary detection stage, the OBB bounding box and the spherical bounding box were used to detect the collision of objects, and the objects that may collide were selected. In the accurate detection stage, the model was sampled, and the feature pairs were used as the set to be detected for detecting collisions, the collision detection problem of the three-dimensional model was transformed into a nonlinear optimization problem of the distance between the feature pairs in the two-dimensional discrete space. The ant colony algorithm was introduced to solve the problem, and the pheromone concentration and update rules of the ant colony algorithm were optimized to improve the efficiency of the algorithm. The simulation results showed that, compared with the commonly used collision detection algorithms, our algorithm had high accuracy in detecting collisions and was less time-consuming. Full article
(This article belongs to the Special Issue Virtual Reality and Human-Computer Interaction)
Show Figures

Figure 1

Back to TopTop