scholarly journals The Software Required for the Computer Generation of Virtual Environments

1993 ◽  
Vol 2 (2) ◽  
pp. 130-140 ◽  
Author(s):  
Michael J. Zyda ◽  
David R. Pratt ◽  
John S. Falby ◽  
Chuck Lombardo ◽  
Kristen M. Kelleher
Keyword(s):  
Virtual Environments ◽  
Virtual Worlds ◽  
Virtual World ◽  
Large Scale ◽  
Autonomous Agents ◽  
Second Phase ◽  
Compressed Video ◽  
Virtual Camera ◽  
Third Phase ◽  
World Development

The first phase of virtual world development has focused on the novel hardware (3-D input and 3-D output) and the graphics demo. The second phase of virtual worlds development will be to focus in on the more significant part of the problem, the software bed underlying “real” applications. The focus of this paper is on the software required to support large scale, networked, multiparty virtual environments. We discuss navigation (virtual camera view point control and its coupling to real-time, hidden surface elimination), interaction (software for constructing a dialogue from the inputs read from our devices and for applying that dialogue to display changes), communication (software for passing changes in the world model to other players on the network, and software for allowing the entry of previously undescribed players into the system), autonomy (software for playing autonomous agents in our virtual world against interactive players), scripting (software for recording, playing back, and multitracking previous play against live or autonomous players, with autonomy provided for departures from the recorded script), and hypermedia integration (software for integrating hypermedia data—audio, compressed video, with embedded links—into our geometrically described virtual world). All of this software serves as the base for the fully detailed, fully interactive, seamless environment of the third phase of virtual world development. We discuss the development of such software by describing how a real system, the NPSNET virtual world, is being constructed.

Spectator View: Enabling Asymmetric Interaction between HMD Wearers and Spectators with a Large Display

2021 ◽  
Vol 5 (ISS) ◽  
pp. 1-17
Author(s):  
Finn Welsford-Ackroyd ◽  
Andrew Chalmers ◽  
Rafael Kuffner dos Anjos ◽  
Daniel Medeiros ◽  
Hyejin Kim ◽  
...  
Keyword(s):  
Virtual World ◽  
Large Scale ◽  
User Study ◽  
Point Of View ◽  
Virtual Camera ◽  
Head Mounted Display ◽  
Joint Task ◽  
Reference Space ◽  
Collaborative Interaction ◽  
The Spectator

In this paper, we present a system that allows a user with a head-mounted display (HMD) to communicate and collaborate with spectators outside of the headset. We evaluate its impact on task performance, immersion, and collaborative interaction. Our solution targets scenarios like live presentations or multi-user collaborative systems, where it is not convenient to develop a VR multiplayer experience and supply each user (and spectator) with an HMD. The spectator views the virtual world on a large-scale tiled video wall and is given the ability to control the orientation of their own virtual camera. This allows spectators to stay focused on the immersed user's point of view or freely look around the environment. To improve collaboration between users, we implemented a pointing system where a spectator can point at objects on the screen, which maps an indicator directly onto the objects in the virtual world. We conducted a user study to investigate the influence of rotational camera decoupling and pointing gestures in the context of HMD-immersed and non-immersed users utilizing a large-scale display. Our results indicate that camera decoupling and pointing positively impacts collaboration. A decoupled view is preferable in situations where both users need to indicate objects of interest in the scene, such as presentations and joint-task scenarios, as it requires a shared reference space. A coupled view, on the other hand, is preferable in synchronous interactions such as remote-assistant scenarios.

Virtual Worlds

2017 ◽  
pp. 549-568
Author(s):  
Michelangelo Tricarico
Keyword(s):  
Virtual Environments ◽  
Virtual Environment ◽  
Virtual Worlds ◽  
Virtual World ◽  
Learning Activities ◽  
Specific Field ◽  
Early School ◽  
Virtual Reconstruction ◽  
3D Virtual Environment ◽  
Master Builder

This chapter discusses the author's experience in virtual environments, with particular reference to virtual reconstruction. The events are narrated from the perspective of a student who at first developed his skills in this specific field at school, and then became competent and passionate enough to teach what he had learned in the course of time. He describes his experience from early school projects to the personal ones; from his award as a “Master Builder” to his early teaching lessons. Other learning activities that can be carried out in a virtual world are also illustrated, with particular reference to “coding”, which appears to be of great interest to the author. The main objective of this paper is to highlight the potential of a 3D virtual environment for the reconstruction of monuments, i.e., the author's area of expertise. It also provides a description of other activities that can be performed in a virtual environment, while illustrating the most common issues that can be experienced and suggesting how to solve them.

Worldlets: 3-D Thumbnails for Wayfinding in Large Virtual Worlds

2001 ◽  
Vol 10 (6) ◽  
pp. 565-582 ◽  
Author(s):  
T. Todd Elvins ◽  
David R. Nadeau ◽  
Rina Schul ◽  
David Kirsh
Keyword(s):  
Virtual Environments ◽  
Virtual Worlds ◽  
Web Sites ◽  
Virtual World ◽  
Modeling Language ◽  
Psychological Experiment ◽  
Web Content ◽  
Image Representations ◽  
Time Required ◽  
Clear Support

Finding one's way to sites of interest on the Web can be problematic, and this difficulty has been recently exacerbated by widespread development of 3-D Web content and virtual-world browser technology using the Virtual Reality Modeling Language (VRML). Whereas travelers can often navigate 2-D Web sites based on textual and 2-D thumbnail image representations of the sites' content, finding one's way to destinations in 3-D environments is notoriously troublesome. Wayfinding literature provides clear support for the importance of landmarks in building a cognitive map and then using that map to navigate in a 3-D environment, be it real or virtual. Textual and 2-D image landmark representations, however, lack the depth and context needed for travelers to reliably recognize 3-D landmarks. This paper describes a novel 3-D thumbnail landmark affordance called a worldlet. Containing a 3-D fragment of a virtual world, worldlets offer travelers first-person, multi-viewpoint experience with faithful representations of potential destinations. To facilitate an investigation into the comparative advantages of landmark affordances for wayfinding, worldlet capture algorithms were designed, implemented, and incorporated into two VRML-based virtual environment browsers. Findings from a psychological experiment using one of these browsers revealed that, compared to textual and image guidebook usage, worldlet guidebook usage: nearly doubled the time subjects spent studying the landmarks in the guidebook, significantly reduced the time required for subjects to reach landmarks, and reduced backtracking to almost zero. These results support the hypothesis that worldlets facilitate traveler landmark knowledge, expedite wayfinding in large virtual environments, and enable skilled wayfinding.

Portraying and Understanding Large-Scale Distributed Virtual Environments: Experience and Tentative Conclusions

1995 ◽  
Vol 4 (2) ◽  
pp. 146-168 ◽  
Author(s):  
Martin R. Stytz ◽  
Bruce Hobbs ◽  
Andrea Kunz ◽  
Brian Soltz ◽  
Kirk Wilson
Keyword(s):  
Virtual Environments ◽  
Virtual Environment ◽  
Large Scale ◽  
Autonomous Agents ◽  
Distributed Simulation ◽  
Ease Of Use ◽  
Space Environment ◽  
Interactive Control ◽  
Near Earth Space ◽  
Distributed Virtual Environments

The Distributed Simulation Internet (DSI) provides users access to large-scale, complex, active, unpredictable virtual environments. If users are to effectively use these environments, they will require support for understanding and acting in these environments. Support is necessary because humans have a time and space limited span of attention. The Satellite Modeler, Omniview true 3D, and Synthetic BattleBridge projects were undertaken to develop and investigate the interfaces and autonomous agents required to effectively support users of the Distributed Simulation Internet. The Satellite Modeler emulates the near-Earth space environment and portrays models of satellites moving in their correct orbits around the Earth. The motion of the satellites is broadcast to users of the DSI. The Satellite Modeler is intended to function as a training and operational aid for orbital analysts and to help them understand key spatial relationships for satellites in near-Earth orbit. The Omniview project was undertaken to provide interactive control and manipulation of a true 3D image and to thereby assist the user in understanding the activity within the DSI-hosted virtual environment. That project developed an interface that provides the Omniview user with the ease of use that a window, icon, mouse, and pointer GUI interface provides to users of 2D displays. The Synthetic BattleBridge is a system that, like the Omniview, portrays a DSI-hosted virtual environment but does not act in it. The Synthetic BattleBridge is designed to support users in making accurate and timely decisions by providing several different types of cognitive support for understanding and analyzing the activity in a battlespace. In this paper, we briefly describe each project and present some observations and conclusions we have drawn based on our experience with them.

scholarly journals A Postphenomenological Framework for Studying User Experience of Immersive Virtual Reality

2021 ◽  
Vol 2 ◽  
Author(s):  
Joakim Vindenes ◽  
Barbara Wasson
Keyword(s):  
Virtual Reality ◽  
Virtual Environments ◽  
Virtual Worlds ◽  
Virtual World ◽  
Philosophy Of Technology ◽  
Immersive Virtual Reality ◽  
Or Education ◽  
Cognitive Changes ◽  
Flexible Technology ◽  
Human World

Virtual Reality (VR) is a remarkably flexible technology for interventions as it allows the construction of virtual worlds with ontologies radically different from the real world. By embodying users in avatars situated in these virtual environments, researchers can effectively intervene and instill positive change in the form of therapy or education, as well as affect a variety of cognitive changes. Due to the capabilities of VR to mediate both the environments in which we are immersed, as well as our embodied, situated relation toward those environments, VR has become a powerful technology for “changing the self.” As the virtually mediated experience is what renders these interventions effective, frameworks are needed for describing and analyzing the mediations brought by various virtual world designs. As a step toward a broader understanding of how VR mediates experience, we propose a post-phenomenological framework for describing VR mediation. Postphenomenology is a philosophy of technology concerned with empirical data that understand technologies as mediators of human-world relationships. By addressing how mediations occur within VR as a user-environment relation and outside VR as a human-world relation, the framework addresses the various constituents of the virtually mediated experience. We demonstrate the framework's capability for describing VR mediations by presenting the results of an analysis of a selected variety of studies that use various user-environment relations to mediate various human-world relations.

scholarly journals Navigation, Wayfinding, and Place Experience within a Virtual City

2000 ◽  
Vol 9 (5) ◽  
pp. 435-447 ◽  
Author(s):  
Craig D. Murray ◽  
John M. Bowers ◽  
Adrian J. West ◽  
Steve Pettifer ◽  
Simon Gibson
Keyword(s):  
Qualitative Study ◽  
Virtual Environments ◽  
Virtual Environment ◽  
Virtual Worlds ◽  
Real World ◽  
Virtual World ◽  
Place Experience ◽  
Virtual City

We report a qualitative study of navigation, wayfinding, and place experience within a virtual city. “Cityscape” is a virtual environment (VE), partially algorithmically generated and intended to be redolent of the aggregate forms of real cities. In the present study, we observed and interviewed participants during and following exploration of a desktop implementation of Cityscape. A number of emergent themes were identified and are presented and discussed. Observing the interaction with the virtual city suggested a continuous relationship between real and virtual worlds. Participants were seen to attribute real-world properties and expectations to the contents of the virtual world. The implications of these themes for the construction of virtual environments modeled on real-world forms are considered.

A changing environment: the virtual world meets the physical world

1999 ◽  
Vol 3 (4) ◽  
pp. 303-306
Author(s):  
William Mitchell
Keyword(s):  
Virtual Environments ◽  
Virtual Worlds ◽  
Virtual World ◽  
Physical World ◽  
The Internet ◽  
Changing Environment ◽  
Challenges And Opportunities ◽  
And Function ◽  
Relationship Of ◽  
The Relationship

With the coming of computers and the Internet, the relationship of the physical and virtual worlds has shifted. Virtual environments will not replace physical ones, but the nature, location, and function of the latter will change, creating both challenges and opportunities for architects.

scholarly journals Saving Second Life: Issues in Archiving a Complex, Multi-User Virtual World

2011 ◽  
Vol 6 (2) ◽  
pp. 89-108 ◽  
Author(s):  
Jerome McDonough ◽  
Robert Olendorf
Keyword(s):  
Popular Culture ◽  
Virtual Environments ◽  
Virtual Worlds ◽  
Second Life ◽  
Virtual World ◽  
Practical Experience ◽  
Digital Information ◽  
Distributed Models ◽  
Life Issues ◽  
Culture Education

Virtual environments, such as Second Life, have assumed an increasingly important role in popular culture, education and research. Unfortunately, we have almost no practical experience in how to preserve these highly dynamic, interactive information resources. This article reports on research by the National Digital Information Infrastructure for Preservation Program (NDIIPP)-funded Preserving Virtual Worlds project, which examines the issues that arise when attempting to archive regions from Second Life. Intellectual property and contractual issues can raise significant impediments to the creation of an archival information package for these environments, as can the technical design of the worlds themselves. We discuss the implication of these impediments for distributed models of preservation, such as NDIIPP.

scholarly journals Detection of Deception in a Virtual World

2013 ◽  
Vol 1 (1) ◽  
pp. 51-66 ◽  
Author(s):  
Lauren B. Collister
Keyword(s):  
Case Studies ◽  
Virtual Worlds ◽  
Virtual World ◽  
Online Community ◽  
Large Scale ◽  
World Of Warcraft ◽  
Small Scale ◽  
Detection Of Deception

This work explores the role of multimodal cues in detection of deception in a virtual world, an online community of World of Warcraft players. Case studies from a five-year ethnography are presented in three categories: small-scale deception in text, deception by avoidance, and large-scale deception in game-external modes. Each case study is analyzed in terms of how the affordances of the medium enabled or hampered deception as well as how the members of the community ultimately detected the deception. The ramifications of deception on the community are discussed, as well as the need for researchers to have a deep community knowledge when attempting to understand the role of deception in a complex society. Finally, recommendations are given for assessment of behavior in virtual worlds and the unique considerations that investigators must give to the rules and procedures of online communities.

scholarly journals Editorial - The Dark Side of Virtual Worlds

2020 ◽  
Vol 13 (1) ◽  
Author(s):  
Angie Marie Cox
Keyword(s):  
Virtual Environments ◽  
Virtual Worlds ◽  
Virtual World ◽  
Digital Games ◽  
Dark Side

The Journal of Virtual World Research’s “The Dark Side” issue dives into some fascinating ideas about how evil is represented in the virtual worlds of digital games. This issue includes five articles elaborating on the motivations for evil acts and their outcomes, hostile competitiveness, classification of deviant leisure, how immoral acts are determined, and our ability to thwart these cruel activities in the virtual environments and games.

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