CAVE-like Virtual Environments Research Articles

Diffusion of Innovation: Case of Co-Design of Cabins in Mobile Work Machine Industry

This paper describes the development of using virtual reality for work content in one application area over a decade. Virtual reality technology has developed rapidly; from walk-in CAVE-like virtual environments to head-mounted displays within a decade. In this paper, the development is studied through the lens of diffusion of innovation theory, which focuses not only on innovation itself, but also on the social system. The development of virtual technology is studied by one case, which is cabin design in the mobile work machine industry. This design process has been especially suitable for using virtual reality technology.

Examining Rotation Gain in CAVE-like Virtual Environments.

When moving through a tracked immersive virtual environment, it is sometimes useful to deviate from the normal one-to-one mapping of real to virtual motion. One option is the application of rotation gain, where the virtual rotation of a user around the vertical axis is amplified or reduced by a factor. Previous research in head-mounted display environments has shown that rotation gain can go unnoticed to a certain extent, which is exploited in redirected walking techniques. Furthermore, it can be used to increase the effective field of regard in projection systems. However, rotation gain has never been studied in CAVE systems, yet. In this work, we present an experiment with 87 participants examining the effects of rotation gain in a CAVE-like virtual environment. The results show no significant effects of rotation gain on simulator sickness, presence, or user performance in a cognitive task, but indicate that there is a negative influence on spatial knowledge especially for inexperienced users. In secondary results, we could confirm results of previous work and demonstrate that they also hold for CAVE environments, showing a negative correlation between simulator sickness and presence, cognitive performance and spatial knowledge, a positive correlation between presence and spatial knowledge, a mitigating influence of experience with 3D applications and previous CAVE exposure on simulator sickness, and a higher incidence of simulator sickness in women.

Design and Evaluation of Data Annotation Workflows for CAVE-like Virtual Environments.

Data annotation finds increasing use in Virtual Reality applications with the goal to support the data analysis process, such as architectural reviews. In this context, a variety of different annotation systems for application to immersive virtual environments have been presented. While many interesting interaction designs for the data annotation workflow have emerged from them, important details and evaluations are often omitted. In particular, we observe that the process of handling metadata to interactively create and manage complex annotations is often not covered in detail. In this paper, we strive to improve this situation by focusing on the design of data annotation workflows and their evaluation. We propose a workflow design that facilitates the most important annotation operations, i.e., annotation creation, review, and modification. Our workflow design is easily extensible in terms of supported annotation and metadata types as well as interaction techniques, which makes it suitable for a variety of application scenarios. To evaluate it, we have conducted a user study in a CAVE-like virtual environment in which we compared our design to two alternatives in terms of a realistic annotation creation task. Our design obtained good results in terms of task performance and user experience.

Localizing Sound Sources in a CAVE-Like Virtual Environment with Loudspeaker Array Reproduction

In a CAVE-like virtual environment spatial audio is typically reproduced with amplitude panning on loudspeakers behind the screens. We arranged a localization experiment where the subjects' task was to point to the perceived location of a sound source. Measured accuracy for a static source was as good as the accuracy in previous headphone experiments using head-related transfer functions. We also measured the localization accuracy of a moving auditory stimulus. The accuracy was decreased by an amount comparable to the minimum audible movement angle.