IEEE Virtual Reality Research Articles

Is medical device regulatory compliance growing as fast as extended reality to avoid misunderstandings in the future?

PurposeEuropean Extended Reality (XR) industry is expected to significantly increase by 2025 with an extreme impact on the Healthcare scenario. Considering that the transition period for the Medical Device Regulation 2017/745 (MDR 2017/745) will end in May 2024, purpose of this study is to assess whether the Medical Device Regulatory Compliance is ready to cope with the inclusion of XR and its possible social and economic impact in the world of medical device software (MDSW).MethodsXR publications patterns were evaluated since MDR 2017/745 release on different databases. European normative about MDSW are consulted, followed by the European Database of Medical Devices (EUDAMED).ResultsThe number of publications on XR have increased since 2017 and healthcare is the third highest-impacted subject area. Specific classes for software have been introduces in the European Nomenclature of Medical Devices (EMDN) and some XR applications have already been registered in EUDAMED classified as MDSW.ConclusionsXR will become intrinsic in everyday medical protocol and guidelines. The establishment of the IEEE Virtual Reality and Augmented Reality Working Group and the statement of VR for remoting surgery as a MDSW in MDCG 2019-11 are demonstration of the necessity of MD regulatory compliance in being able to keep up with the upcoming XR technologies. The Authors agree that the competent authorities should consider intervening in the European Regulative Compliance to cope with the revolution of Phygital in Healthcare and to regulate procedures involving the use of XR in medicine preventing future misunderstanding and criticalities especially for high risk situations.

IEEE VR 2023 Introducing the Special Issue

Welcome to the 12th IEEE Transactions on Visualization and Computer Graphics (TVCG) special issue on IEEE Virtual Reality and 3D User Interfaces. This volume contains a total of 61 full papers selected for and presented at the IEEE Conference on Virtual Reality and 3D User Interfaces (IEEE VR 2023), held in a hybrid style physically in Shanghai, China and virtually online, from March 25 to 29, 2023.

Toward VR in VR: Assessing Engagement and Social Interaction in a Virtual Conference

The pandemic brought about an unprecedented number of virtual conferences, given the heavy restrictions on travel to in-person meetings. Despite all the advances in technology, people still complain about virtual events. There is Zoom fatigue, confinement malaise, and a longing for personal social interactions. This paper discusses our experience organizing the IEEE Virtual Reality Conference (IEEE VR) as a virtual event. IEEE VR was a success with 1200+ registered paying participants, dozens of workshops and tutorials, and hundreds of technical papers. We used (1) a virtual environment platform, together with (2) discussion tools and (3) videoconferencing/broadcast/online tools to further provide effective social interaction and increase engagement. In this paper, we explore the synergies between virtual environments and other online tools and assess user engagement by analyzing the messages exchanged between participants across different genders and geographical regions. To this end, we apply diverse engagement metrics for online conferences. Our analysis shows that these metrics have the potential to highlight engagement, diversity, and inclusion by combining textual messages, participant geographic and gender information, communities of participants, and visitation patterns in a virtual environment. Drawing on our results and experiences, we propose guidelines for organizing technical virtual events to increase diversity and social interaction.

The sentiment of a virtual rock concert

We created a virtual reality version of a 1983 performance by Dire Straits, this being a highly complex scenario consisting of both the virtual band performance and the appearance and behaviour of the virtual audience surrounding the participants. Our goal was to understand the responses of participants, and to learn how this type of scenario might be improved for later reconstructions of other concerts. To understand the responses of participants we carried out two studies which used sentiment analysis of texts written by the participants. Study 1 (n = 25) (Beacco et al. in IEEE Virtual Reality: 538–545, 2021) had the unexpected finding that negative sentiment was caused by the virtual audience, where e.g. some participants were fearful of being harassed by audience members. In Study 2 (n = 26) notwithstanding some changes, the audience again led to negative sentiment—e.g. a feeling of being stared at. For Study 2 we compared sentiment with questionnaire scores, finding that the illusion of being at the concert was associated with positive sentiment for males but negative for females. Overall, we found sentiment was dominated by responses to the audience rather than the band. Participants had been placed in an unusual situation, being alone at a concert, surrounded by strangers, who seemed to pose a social threat for some of them. We relate our findings to the concept of Plausibility, the illusion that events and situations in the VR are really happening. The results indicate high Plausibility, since the negative sentiment, for example in response to being started at, only makes sense if the events are experienced as actually happening. We conclude with the need for co-design of VR scenarios, and the use of sentiment analysis in this process, rather than sole reliance on concepts proposed by researchers, typically expressed through questionnaires, which may not reflect the experiences of participants.

IEEE VR 2022 Introducing the Special Issue

Welcome to the 11 <italic xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink">th IEEE Transactions on Visualization and Computer Graphics (TVCG)</i> special issue on IEEE Virtual Reality and 3D User Interfaces. This volume contains a total of 29 full papers selected for and presented at the IEEE Conference on Virtual Reality and 3D User Interfaces (IEEE VR 2022), held fully virtual in Christchurch, New Zealand from March 12 to 16, 2022.

Multisensory stimulation

Multisensory stimulation

Introducing the IEEE Virtual Reality 2021 Special Issue

Welcome to the 10th IEEE Transactions on Visualization and Computer Graphics (TVCG) special issue on IEEE Virtual Reality and 3D User Interfaces. This volume contains a total of 25 full papers selected for and presented at the IEEE Conference on Virtual Reality and 3D User Interfaces (IEEE VR 2021), held fully virtual from March 27 to April 3, 2021. Founded in 1993, IEEE VR has a long tradition as the premier venue where new research results in the field of Virtual Reality (VR) are presented. With the emergence of VR as a major technology in a diverse set of fields, such as entertainment, education, data analytics, artificial intelligence, medicine, construction, training, and many others, the papers presented at IEEE VR and published in the IEEE TVCG VR special issue mark a major highlight of the year.

Introducing the IEEE Virtual Reality 2020 Special Issue

Welcome to the 9th <italic xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink">IEEE Transactions on Visualization and Computer Graphics (TVCG</i> ) special issue on IEEE Virtual Reality and 3D User Interfaces. This volume contains a total of 29 full papers selected for and presented at the IEEE Conference on Virtual Reality and 3D User Interfaces (IEEE VR 2020) held in Atlanta, United States on March 22–26, 2020. Founded in 1993, IEEE VR has a long tradition as the premier venue where new research results in the field of Virtual Reality (VR) are presented. With the emergence of VR as a major technology in a diverse set of fields, such as entertainment, education, data analytics, artificial intelligence, medicine, construction, training, and many others, the papers presented at IEEE VR and published in the <italic xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink">IEEE TVCG VR</i> special issue mark a major highlight of the year.

Mind the Gap: The Underrepresentation of Female Participants and Authors in Virtual Reality Research.

A common goal of human-subject experiments in virtual reality (VR) research is evaluating VR hardware and software for use by the general public. A core principle of human-subject research is that the sample included in a given study should be representative of the target population; otherwise, the conclusions drawn from the findings may be biased and may not generalize to the population of interest. In order to assess whether characteristics of participants in VR research are representative of the general public, we investigated participant demographic characteristics from human-subject experiments in the Proceedings of the IEEE Virtual Reality Conferences from 2015-2019. We also assessed the representation of female authors. In the 325 eligible manuscripts, which presented results from 365 human-subject experiments, we found evidence of significant underrepresentation of women as both participants and authors. To investigate whether this underrepresentation may bias researchers' findings, we then conducted a meta-analysis and meta-regression to assess whether demographic characteristics of study participants were associated with a common outcome evaluated in VR research: the change in simulator sickness following head-mounted display VR exposure. As expected, participants in VR studies using HMDs experienced small but significant increases in simulator sickness. However, across the included studies, the change in simulator sickness was systematically associated with the proportion of female participants. We discuss the negative implications of conducting experiments on non-representative samples and provide methodological recommendations for mitigating bias in future VR research.

Reflections from five years of Sonic Interactions in Virtual Environments workshops

For the past five years, the authors have been running at the IEEE Virtual Reality Conference a Workshop called Sonic Interactions in Virtual Environments (SIVE). The main goal of the workshop series has been to increase among the virtual reality community awareness of the importance of sonic elements when designing multimodal and immersive virtual environments. Starting from this experience, this paper presents a survey of the main active research topics related to sound in virtual and augmented reality (VR/AR), ranging from basic research in spatial audio rendering and sonic interaction design to applications in interactive environments for training, health, rehabilitation, entertainment, and art. Looking at the different research topics emerging from laboratories worldwide, the paper discusses how different research communities can collaborate and benefit from each other in order to increase sound awareness in VR and AR.

Introducing the IEEE Virtual Reality 2019 Special Issue

The thirty-three papers included in this special issue were presented at the 2019 8th Virtual Reality Conference that was held in Osaka, Japan, March 23-27, 2019.

Introducing the IEEE Virtual Reality 2018 Special Issue

This special issue of IEEE Transactions on Visualization and Computer Graphics (TVCG) contains the 29 full papers selected for the IEEE Virtual Reality and 3D User Interfaces (IEEE VR 2018) Conference held in Reutlingen, Germany, March 18-22, 2017. Since its inception in 1993, IEEE VR has been the premier venue to present new research results in the field of Virtual Reality (VR). The strong current trends toward VR systems for consumer audiences heightens the importance of this event. This fact is reflected in the cooperation between TVCG and IEEE VR, which is in its seventh year and is one cornerstone of the strategy of TVCG to combine computer graphics and data visualization in its scope with virtual and augmented reality. The special issue format combines speed of publication with all the established advantages of an archival journal. To that end, a rigorous and competitive two-round review process was performed to ensure the highest quality.

Introducing the IEEE Virtual Reality 2017 Special Issue.

The papers in this special issue were presented at the IEEE Virtual Reality (VR) Conference that was held in Los Angeles, CA, from March 18-22, 2017.

IEEE Visualization and Graphics Technical Committee (VGTC)

Presents a listing of the technical committee from the 2017 IEEE Virtual Reality Conference (IEEE VR 2017).

Special Section: Best Short Papers from IEEE Virtual Reality 2015 Guest Editors' Introduction

Special Section: Best Short Papers from IEEE Virtual Reality 2015 Guest Editors' Introduction

IEEE Transactions on Visualization and Computer Graphics - 2014 IEEE Virtual Reality Conference [title page

IEEE Transactions on Visualization and Computer Graphics - 2014 IEEE Virtual Reality Conference [title page

State of the Journal

IEEE Transactions on Visualization and Computer Graphics (TVCG) has published more papers in 2013 than in any previous year. TVCG continues to be in an excellent state. For the first time, the entire proceedings of IEEE VAST 2013 papers became part of the VIS special issue of TVCG. At the start of October 2013, TVCG had received more than 265 regular submissions, more than last year at the same time. This year we also observed a healthy number of 150 and 402 submissions to the IEEE VR Conference issue and the VIS conference issue that contains the Proceedings of the IEEE Information Visualization, Scientific Visualization, and Visual Analytics Science and Technology 2013 Conferences, respectively. We are expecting a total of nearly 900 submissions to TVCG by the end of 2013. A total of 137 articles were published in the first 10 regular issues with 1,769 printed pages, and the VR and VIS special issues containing 21 and 101 conference papers, respectively. All submissions in both special issues went through a rigorous two-round journalquality review process. Practically all the 2012 papers have also been decided. From the 293 regular submissions (including 20 extended versions of Best Papers from several top venues in graphics and visualization), 76 regular papers and all 20 special section papers were eventually accepted; 86 out of 333 SciVis plus InfoVis conference submissions were published in the VIS special issue. TVCG continues to offer authors a remarkably effi cient processing of submitted manuscripts: The average time from submission to fi rst decision is about three months and the average time from submission to publication as a preprint in the digital library is about seven months. Its 2012 impact factor is 1.895 with the largest number of total publications appeared two years prior. During 2013, the authors of TVCG regular papers were invited to give an oral presentation of their recent work at TVCG’s partner conferences. A total of 35 TVCG papers were presented at the IEEE Virtual Reality Conference, ACM SIGGRAPH Symposium on Interactive 3D Graphics and Games, ACM SIGGRAPH/Eurographics Symposium on Computer Animation, Pacifi c Graphics, and IEEE VIS 2013.

Message from the Paper Chairs and Guest Editors

The apers in this special issue were presented at the 2013 IEEE Virtual Reality Conference held March 16-20, 2013, in Orlando, Florida.

IEEE Virtual Reality Conference 2013 [table of contents

Presents the table of contents of the proceedings of the 2013 IEEE Virtual Reality Conference as published in this issue of the IEEE Transactions on Visualization and Computer Graphics .

Guest Editors' Introduction: Special Section on the IEEE Virtual Reality Conference (VR)

The articles in this special section contain selected papers from the IEEE Virtual Reality Conference (VR).