Virtual placemaking: self-built environments and revisiting shared memories in virtual reality increase group cohesion

Human-Computer Interaction (HCI) in Virtual Reality (VR) environments is a rapidly evolving field that seeks to enhance user experience through immersive and intuitive design principles. As VR technology advances, the interaction between humans and virtual systems becomes increasingly complex, requiring innovative approaches to ensure usability, accessibility, and engagement. This paper explores the fundamental principles of HCI in VR, focusing on interaction techniques, input modalities, feedback mechanisms, and the psychological impact of virtual experiences. Various interaction techniques, such as hand tracking, motion controllers, eye-tracking, and voice commands, are examined, highlighting their advantages and limitations in different applications. Additionally, feedback mechanisms, including haptic feedback, spatial audio, and visual cues, play a crucial role in enhancing realism and user immersion. The study also addresses cognitive and ergonomic challenges, such as motion sickness, cognitive load, and the importance of adaptive interfaces that accommodate diverse user needs. Furthermore, the concept of presence—the feeling of “being there” in a virtual space—is explored, emphasizing how design choices influence immersion and engagement. Accessibility considerations, including designing for users with disabilities and optimizing VR experiences for different demographics, are also discussed. By analyzing current trends, user experience research, and best practices, this study provides insights for designers, developers, and researchers aiming to create effective, user-friendly, and inclusive VR applications. Ultimately, the goal is to improve the seamless integration of humans and virtual environments, enhancing usability and effectiveness across various domains such as gaming, education, healthcare, and remote collaboration.

User Experience and Engagement in the Reality–Virtuality Continuum: A Special Issue Guest Editorial

Human-environment interactions normally occur in the physical milieu, and thus by medium of the body and within the space immediately adjacent to and surrounding the body; the peri-personal space (PPS). However, human interactions increasingly occur with or within virtual environments, and hence novel approaches and metrics must be developed to index human-environment interactions in virtual reality (VR). Here we present a multisensory task that measures the spatial extent of human PPS in real, virtual, and augmented realities. We validated it in a mixed reality ecosystem in which real environment and virtual objects are blended together in order to administer and control visual, auditory, and tactile stimuli in ecologically valid conditions. Within this mixed-reality environment, participants are asked to respond as fast as possible to tactile stimuli on their body, while task-irrelevant visual or audio-visual stimuli approach their body. Results demonstrate that, in analogy with observations derived from monkey electrophysiology and in real environmental surroundings, tactile detection is enhanced when visual or auditory stimuli are close to the body, and not when far from it. We then calculate the location where this multisensory facilitation occurs as a proxy of the boundary of PPS. We observe that mapping of PPS via audio-visual, as opposed to visual alone, looming stimuli results in sigmoidal fits – allowing for the bifurcation between near and far space – with greater goodness of fit. In sum, our approach is able to capture the boundaries of PPS on a spatial continuum, at the individual-subject level, and within a fully controlled and previously laboratory-validated setup, while maintaining the richness and ecological validity of real-life events. The task can therefore be applied to study the properties of peri-personal space in humans and to index the features governing human-environment interactions in virtual or mixed reality. We propose PPS as an ecologically valid and neurophysiologically established metric in the study of the impact of VR and related technologies on society and individuals.

Agency, or the capacity to take intentional actions, is considered one of the primary affordances of virtual reality (VR) for learning. VR is expected to increase learners' agency because it allows for full‐body interactivity from a first‐person perspective, giving them novel ways of interacting with the digital environment. Yet, agency in immersive learning has not been well‐studied relative to other affordances like presence, and more evidence is needed to understand how varied media and designs heighten or diminish agency. This mixed‐method study addressed this need by developing and validating measures of sense of agency with 30 high school students who used VR field trips in their engineering class over four lessons. By comparing immersive videos to video game‐like interactive graphical environments, the study illustrates some of the complexities of agency in VR. The findings indicate agency is not a unidimensional construct nor is it equivalent to full‐body interactivity in VR as learners felt some types of agency when using immersive videos. Furthermore, learners' identities moderated associations between the type of VR media and their sense of agency, and agency did not change over time as the novelty of VR waned. These results suggest VR designers should consider varied ways of interacting in VR that are beneficial for learning. They also support the use of immersive videos when the educator's goal is to increase agency over learning or focus, and provide measures and direction for future research to assess the relationship between varied types of agency, features of VR experiences and learning outcomes. Practitioner notes What is already known about this topic Virtual reality (VR) can enhance learning by giving learners a strong sense of presence in the virtual environment and giving them agency over their learning through novel forms of interactivity. Many studies have looked at increasing the learner's presence in VR, but fewer have assessed learners' agency. Prior work found the impact of increased interactivity on learning was mixed: sometimes it increased learning outcomes and motivation, other times it did not. What this paper adds This study develops and validates measures of learners' sense of agency within VR learning environments. This study finds that more interactivity in VR increases how much agency learners feel over their actions but not necessarily their agency over learning and attention. This study also finds variation in students' experiences of agency based on their culturally defined sense of self‐construal. Implications for practice and/or policy Practitioners interested in immersive learning technologies should consider the design of the media used rather than focusing only on the device's capability. Immersive videos may be effective tools for enhancing student agency, depending on the aims of the learning experience. Designers and educators should consider learners' identities such as self‐construal, and understand student experiences may vary.

Some of the barriers preventing virtual reality (VR) from being widely adopted are the cost and unfamiliarity of VR systems. Here, we propose that in many cases, the specialized controllers shipped with most VR head-mounted displays can be replaced by a regular smartphone, cutting the cost of the system, and allowing users to interact in VR using a device they are already familiar with. To achieve this, we developed SmartVR Pointer, an approach that uses smartphones to replace the specialized controllers for two essential operations in VR: selection and navigation by teleporting. In SmartVR Pointer, a camera mounted on the head-mounted display (HMD) is tilted downwards so that it points to where the user will naturally be holding their phone in front of them. SmartVR Pointer supports three selection modalities: tracker based, gaze based, and combined/hybrid. In the tracker-based SmartVR Pointer selection, we use image-based tracking to track a QR code displayed on the phone screen and then map the phone's position to a pointer shown within the field of view of the camera in the virtual environment. In the gaze-based selection modality, the user controls the pointer using their gaze and taps on the phone for selection. The combined technique is a hybrid between gaze-based interaction in VR and tracker-based Augmented Reality. It allows the user to control a VR pointer that looks and behaves like a mouse pointer by moving their smartphone to select objects within the virtual environment, and to interact with the selected objects using the smartphone's touch screen. The touchscreen is used for selection and dragging. The SmartVR Pointer is simple and requires no calibration and no complex hardware assembly or disassembly. We demonstrate successful interactive applications of SmartVR Pointer in a VR environment with a demo where the user navigates in the virtual environment using teleportation points on the floor and then solves a Tetris-style key-and-lock challenge.

Virtual Reality (VR) applications often require users to perform actions with two hands when performing tasks and interacting with objects in virtual environments. Although bimanual interactions in VR can resemble real-world interactions—thus increasing realism and improving immersion—they can also pose significant accessibility challenges to people with limited mobility, such as for people who have full use of only one hand. An opportunity exists to create accessible techniques that take advantage of users’ abilities, but designers currently lack structured tools to consider alternative approaches. To begin filling this gap, we propose Two-In-One, a design space that facilitates the creation of accessible methods for bimanual interactions in VR from unimanual input. Our design space comprises two dimensions, bimanual interactions and computer assistance, and we provide a detailed examination of issues to consider when creating new unimanual input techniques that map to bimanual interactions in VR. We used our design space to create three interaction techniques that we subsequently implemented for a subset of bimanual interactions and received user feedback through a video elicitation study with 17 people with limited mobility. Our findings explore complex tradeoffs associated with autonomy and agency and highlight the need for additional settings and methods to make VR accessible to people with limited mobility.

ObjectivesThis scoping review aimed to identify and summarize the current research on virtual reality (VR) technologies used for health education in cancer patients, as well as to identify key areas of application.MethodsIn accordance with the Preferred Reporting Items for Systematic Reviews and Meta-Analyses Extension for Scoping Reviews guidelines, a comprehensive literature search was performed across 11 electronic databases and gray literature sources from inception to 12 September 2025. Studies employing immersive VR tools to improve health education outcomes in cancer patients were included. Data extraction and thematic synthesis were conducted to map evidence regarding VR modalities, educational applications, and outcome measures.ResultsTwenty-eight studies met the inclusion criteria. VR was applied across four primary educational scenarios, including radiotherapy, chemotherapy, surgery, and healthy behavior (including rehabilitation, smoking cessation, and self-management). Eight distinct VR modalities were identified, namely VR videos, virtual environments, virtual environment for radiotherapy training (VERT), VR interactions, 3D models, VR games, VR non-player characters (VR NPCs), and virtual libraries. Among these, VR videos (50.0 %), virtual environments (46.4 %), and VR interactions (28.6 %) were the most frequently employed. The interventions led to significant improvements in patient knowledge, skills, attitudes, health behaviors, and psychological well-being. A clear evolution in VR educational approaches has been observed, shifting from static environmental familiarization toward interactive, gamified, and intelligence-driven experiences. Nevertheless, notable gaps remain regarding safety protocols and data privacy protections, with only a minority of studies addressing these issues.ConclusionsVR technologies demonstrate considerable promise as an innovative educational tool in oncology care, enhancing patient understanding, psychological preparedness, and engagement throughout the cancer journey. Future implementation must address infrastructural, ethical, and user-centered design barriers to facilitate the scalable and sustainable integration of this approach into clinical practice.

This experiment examined the effects of social presence and perceived location of a virtual environment on participants' pain thresholds in a preregistered, within-subjects experiment. First, we examined the effects of social interaction versus being alone in a virtual environment. Second, we compared a virtual environment representing a remote location to a replication of the laboratory environment. Social interaction predicted increased pain tolerance, but there was no effect of the "location" of the virtual environment. To our knowledge, this research project is the first to use real-time social interaction in virtual reality as a distractor for experimental thermal pain, and the first to examine the potential interaction between social interaction and transportation to different virtual locations. While this task is not directly analogous to the experience of pain in a medical setting, this preliminary study indicates future avenues for patient treatment. Clinical Trial Registration number: 1701006910.

This study investigates how individual predispositions toward Virtual Reality (VR) affect user experiences in collaborative VR environments, particularly in workplace settings. By adapting the Video Game Pursuit Scale to measure VR predisposition, we aim to establish the reliability and validity of this adapted measure in assessing how personal characteristics influence engagement and interaction in VR. Two studies, the first correlational and the second quasi-experimental, were conducted to examine the impact of environmental features, specifically the differences between static and mobile VR platforms, on participants’ perceptions of time, presence, and task motivation. The findings indicate that individual differences in VR predisposition significantly influence user experiences in virtual environments with important implications for enhancing VR applications in training and team collaboration. This research contributes to the understanding of human–computer interaction in VR and offers valuable insights for organizations aiming to implement VR technologies effectively. The results highlight the importance of considering psychological factors in the design and deployment of VR systems, paving the way for future research in this rapidly evolving field.

Virtual reality stroke rehabilitation - hype or hope?

A visually realistic grasping system for object manipulation and interaction in virtual reality environments

The dynamic development of solutions in the field of virtual and augmented reality poses challenges to designers. These challenges relate to both technical conditions, including hardware capabilities and software solutions, as well as psychophysical constructs conditioning the end users’ reception of the generated multimedia message. One of the key elements of the virtual and augmented reality experience is the interaction with the system through a virtual agent represented by an avatar, i.e. a reflection of the image of a participant in the virtual world, carrying on a conversation with the user. This paper presents a proposed software and hardware solution for conducting multifaceted research and comparative analysis of diverse interfaces and human-computer interaction in virtual and augmented reality. In the course of this research, statistically significant results were obtained indicating differences in perception between three types of virtual agents. Each of them represented by different avatars in a specially created research environment that allowed to conduct usability tests under reproducible conditions to study user interaction in virtual reality.

Purpose This pilot study aimed to (a) investigate opportunities for immersive Virtual Reality (VR) technology in communication, physical, and visual rehabilitation by examining the interaction of people without disabilities in a range of structured virtual environments; and (b) validate research protocols that might be used to evaluate the physical, visual, and verbal interaction of users in virtual worlds, and their safety while using the technology. Methods Thirteen adults identifying as people without disability were exposed to VR via a head-mounted display. A video-review method was used to qualitatively code and analyse each participant’s communication, movement, orientation, and support needs. Results All participants oriented to their virtual environments sufficiently to use applications. Their spoken language was effective for interaction, although unconventional social behaviours were also observed. Two participants reported minor adverse reactions consistent with mild cybersickness. Conclusion The results provide insight into the types of environments and characters that support the greatest communicative, physical, and visual interaction in immersive VR. The tested protocols are useful to assess safety when using VR, and to observe communicative, physical, and visual interaction with virtual environments and characters. Implications for future research and use of VR with people with communication, physical and visual disability are discussed.

Virtual reality (VR) offers unique opportunities for examining intergroup interactions. Even though VR-based intergroup contact has been seen as promising in reducing prejudice, researchers have faced significant challenges to deliver effective virtual contact interventions and called for better understanding of VR-specific identity-related processes that are present during and facilitate the social interactions in VR. This is a follow-up study on the virtual intergroup contact intervention conducted among 132 White Italian adult participants. The intervention failed to obtain virtual intergroup contact effects on explicit prejudice and showed only a marginal improvement in implicit intergroup bias towards people of African descent following cooperative intergroup contact with a Black avatar. Critical factors contributing to decreasing prejudice in VR were co-presence, body ownership and common cyber identity. In this follow-up study, we examine an additional mechanism that may influence intergroup outcomes in VR contact: the experience of Collective Psychological Ownership of a Virtual Space (CPO-VS). Particularly, we examine the effect of CPO-VS on explicit and implicit attitudes toward people of African ethnic descent following cooperative intergroup contact with an avatar representing a Black person. Results showed that higher perceived CPO-VS was associated with more favorable explicit attitudes toward outgroup members following VR experience across conditions, but it did not moderate the effect of contact on outgroup attitudes. These findings suggest that fostering collective psychological ownership in shared virtual spaces may improve intergroup relations.

Extended-Reality Technologies: An Overview of Emerging Applications in Medical Education and Clinical Care.