Immersive Space Research Articles

Quick, Quick, Slow: Making Time for Sustainable Photography Practices in Contemporary Higher Education

AbstractAs environmental awareness grows, so do questions about the environmental impact of photography, in particular traditional film development and processing, which includes the use of plastics, gelatine and other environmentally harmful chemicals notwithstanding water usage and waste. Pioneering practice and research into sustainable alternatives to conventional processes has quickly established, supported by organisations such as The Sustainable Darkroom. Students in Higher Education are environmentally aware and prepared to take action to mitigate their impacts where possible. As such, there is a coalescence of perceptions within and beyond the classroom which asks to be addressed in the curriculum. This paper draws upon the research project Under a Green Light: A Darkroom for the Future which investigated how university darkroom practices can pivot toward more environmentally friendly methods. The paper describes the learning environment of the darkroom as a space of slowness, immersion and experimentation and the pedagogic value of this for photography students. The paper argues that incorporating environmental awareness into day‐to‐day teaching through systemic changes to process and practice, rather than through short term curriculum interventions, contributes to transformative learning experiences and promotes positive long‐term change.

Integrating Gamification with BIM for Enhancing Participatory Design

The combination of gamification and Building Information Modeling (BIM) can be described to support user participation, decision-making, and collaboration in design contexts. Within this aim, this paper presents a literature review on the potential of using gamification in the BIM framework to create immersive participatory design environments. Active involvement of stakeholders by the corporation of gamified components such as challenges and interactive simulations into the design process enables better decisions and enhances user experience. Further, gamification integrated into BIM brings the potential to improve user behavior and decision-making at all stages of the design lifecycle but also the limitations and challenges. It can encourage stakeholder interaction and provide real-time input allowing various stakeholders to make meaningful contributions towards sustainability goals. This study examines recent developments and trends in extended reality (XR), augmented reality (AR), and virtual reality (VR). These advances significantly enhance gamified Building Information Modeling (BIM) environments as being immersive. In addition, it points out some challenges, and ethical concerns encountered with these technologies. Furthermore, this paper highlights some tools and their advantages, disadvantages, pricing, and key elements. Designers can create interactive experiences by combining these technologies with virtual and physical environments. BIM environments powered by gamification can be used in BIM workflows to reach their full potential in shaping future design practices. These include ways to advance cooperative design processes by creating immersive spaces for different stakeholders’ interests and keeping up with emergent technology.

The Metaverse Territorial Brand: A Contemporary Concept

The “Metaverse Territorial Brand” integrates core and interconnected elements into a virtual, interactional, experiential, and immersive space known as the metaverse. This type of brand encompasses the connection with immersive territories that may or may not be digital twins of real territories. It also encompasses two interconnected physical scales: the territorial and the regional, involved in another type of emerging territorial scale, known as the metaversal scale. Therefore, the “Metaverse Territorial Brand” is a digital-immersive extension of the territorial brand of physical territories, encompassing specific geographical and cultural aspects, but directed to the metaverse environment. This brand is a symbolic digital construction, but also a multifaceted one that incorporates discursive and visual elements, articulated by the social actors of the immersive territory, aiming to create a specific and distinct identity for a space in the metaverse. When talking about social actors in the metaverse (users), we highlight that this set of actors may or may not be the same as the physical territory. It is also important to highlight that both the territorial brand directed to physical territories and the “Metaverse Territorial Brand” are formed from the power relations of a given set of social actors. Therefore, without the strategic intention of a plurality of social actors that stimulate these relationships, there is no type of territorial brand involved.

XR-based interactive visualization platform for real-time exploring dynamic earth science data

The transition from 2D planar displays to immersive holographic 3D environments has brought advancements in visualization technology. However, there remains a lack of effective interactive visualization tools for complex multi-dimensional structured or unstructured datasets in immersive space. To address this gap, we have developed MetIVA, a state-of-the-art multiscale interactive data visualization platform that leverages the Extended Reality (XR) and cloud rendering technology for immersive data exploration. In this paper, we firstly outline the historical development of scientific visualization and the recent shift towards 3D and higher-dimensional visualization, and then basically introduce the conceptual framework and platform structure of MetIVA, and finally present the evaluation results from recruited potential users. The results confirm that MetIVA is a powerful tool to accelerate data exploration and decision-making processes. Its interactive and intuitive features, along with ongoing optimization efforts, make it a valuable tool for researchers and practitioners in the field of Earth science.

Investigating Professional Analyst Strategies in Immersive Space to Think.

Existing research on sensemaking in immersive analytics systems primarily focuses on understanding how users complete analysis within these systems with quantitative and qualitative datasets. However, these user studies mainly concentrate on understanding analysis styles and methodologies from a predominantly novice user study population. While this approach provides excellent initial insights into what users may do within IA systems, it fails to address how professionals may utilize an immersive analytic system for analysis tasks. In our work, we build upon an existing immersive analytics concept - "Immersive Space to Think" to understand how professional user populations differ from novice users in immersive analytic system usage. We conducted a user study with 11 professional intelligence analysts who completed three analysis sessions each. Using our results from this study, we provide deep analysis into how professional users complete sensemaking within immersive analytic systems, compare our findings to previously published findings with a novice user population, and provide insights into how to develop better IA systems to support the professional analyst's strategies within these systems.

Digital Hybrid Technology and Literary Fantasy of Today's Cinema: A Case Study of Jumanji

This study examines how state-of-the-art cinematic techniques, such as computer-generated imagery (CGI), visual effects, and the integration of digital characters with real-world environments, are used to achieve a seamless blend of fantasy and reality in the "Jumanji" film series (1995, 2005, 2017, 2019). The research investigates bringing the "Jumanji" game to life and how these technologies materialize the fantasy elements of the original game within the real world. It explores crafting a fantastical narrative, i.e., how they establish a captivating and immersive space adventure experience in "Zathura." This study suggests that contemporary fans of "Jumanji" have a distinct perception of the film because they enjoy the mix of immersive fantasy and a sense of real-world connection.

A Study on Utilizing Media Art for Creating Immersive Spaces in Digital Art Museums

A Study on Utilizing Media Art for Creating Immersive Spaces in Digital Art Museums

Applied Social Research in the Healthcare System: New Forms and Meanings of Interdisciplinarity

This article provides a summary of the V Anniversary Forum with International Participation “Sociology of Health: New Forms of Interdisciplinary Synergy,” which took place at the end of 2023. Based on the materials of the Forum, topical issues in the field of applying social research methodologies to healthcare organization are observed. Among them are such topics as the value and strategies for applying interdisciplinary approaches, the emergence of new trends and understanding of old ones in healthcare digitalization (neural networks, new research methods, gamification, transformation of communication), focusing on certain vulnerable population groups, e.g., the senior population and their health, increasing attention to mental health issues, etc. The Forum offered new forms of interdisciplinary dialogue, connecting standard scientific sections with novel ideas such as immersive spaces. According to survey results, the event was highly appreciated by listeners, showing how well it matched their interests.

Availability of Human Resource Learning Content in Virtual Reality: Reasons and Implications

The rapidly growing domain of virtual reality (VR) has witnessed considerable traction in the realm of education. Notwithstanding, a discernible void persists in the accessibility of VR content specifically tailored for the domain of Human Resource Management (HRM). This paper endeavors to explain the underlying causes contributing to the scarcity of HR-related VR content. Furthermore, the paper focuses on the reasons and implications of not having sufficient HR content in the immersive space. The paper proposes an innovative solution in the form of a “VR-HR Training Needs Identification Framework”. This conceptual framework is designed to facilitate VR content developers in pinpointing the precise core requirements inherent to HR, thereby enhancing the development process.

A New Generation of Collaborative Immersive Analytics on the Web: Open-Source Services to Capture, Process and Inspect Users’ Sessions in 3D Environments

Recording large amounts of users’ sessions performed through 3D applications may provide crucial insights into interaction patterns. Such data can be captured from interactive experiences in public exhibits, remote motion tracking equipment, immersive XR devices, lab installations or online web applications. Immersive analytics (IA) deals with the benefits and challenges of using immersive environments for data analysis and related design solutions to improve the quality and efficiency of the analysis process. Today, web technologies allow us to craft complex applications accessible through common browsers, and APIs like WebXR allow us to interact with and explore virtual 3D environments using immersive devices. These technologies can be used to access rich, immersive spaces but present new challenges related to performance, network bottlenecks and interface design. WebXR IA tools are still quite new in the literature: they present several challenges and leave quite unexplored the possibility of synchronous collaborative inspection. The opportunity to share the virtual space with remote analysts in fact improves sense-making tasks and offers new ways to discuss interaction patterns together, while inspecting captured records or data aggregates. Furthermore, with proper collaborative approaches, analysts are able to share machine learning (ML) pipelines and constructively discuss the outcomes and insights through tailored data visualization, directly inside immersive 3D spaces, using a web browser. Under the H2IOSC project, we present the first results of an open-source pipeline involving tools and services aimed at capturing, processing and inspecting interactive sessions collaboratively in WebXR with other analysts. The modular pipeline can be easily deployed in research infrastructures (RIs), remote dedicated hubs or local scenarios. The developed WebXR immersive analytics tool specifically offers advanced features for volumetric data inspection, query, annotation and discovery, alongside spatial interfaces. We assess the pipeline through users’ sessions captured during two remote public exhibits, by a WebXR application presenting generative AI content to visitors. We deployed the pipeline to assess the different services and to better understand how people interact with generative AI environments. The obtained results can be easily adopted for a multitude of case studies, interactive applications, remote equipment or online applications, to support or accelerate the detection of interaction patterns among remote analysts collaborating in the same 3D space.

Isometric Immersions and the Waving of Flags.

In this article we propose a novel geometric model to study the motion of a physical flag. In our approach, a flag is viewed as an isometric immersion from the square with values in satisfying certain boundary conditions at the flag pole. Under additional regularity constraints we show that the space of all such flags carries the structure of an infinite dimensional manifold and can be viewed as a submanifold of the space of all immersions. In the second part of the article we equip the space of isometric immersions with its natural kinetic energy and derive the corresponding equations of motion. This approach can be viewed in a spirit similar to Arnold's geometric picture for the motion of an incompressible fluid.

Radical Left Culture and Heritage, the Politics of Preservation and Memorialisation, and the Promise of the Metaverse

Radical left culture and heritage—understood as incarnations of leftist artefacts and praxis both past and present—have taken risks in challenging hegemonic machinations often when it is unpopular to do so. To the ire of hegemons, leftist projects across the globe have marshalled places, spaces, and technologies into sites of empowerment and struggle utilising ‘small’ and ‘big’ acts of resistance and critical interventions to champion social justice—sometimes successfully, and at other times, less so. However, the preservation of projects’ artefacts, praxis, and memory work has been anything but straightforward, owing primarily to institutional politics and infrastructural and resourcing issues. Taking The Freedom Archives (FA) as a case study, this article explores how FA is preserving the distinctive political education programme that underpinned the iconic liberation struggle in Guinea-Bissau that kickstarted the seismic, global decolonisation project in the late 1950s. The article argues that FA could substantially enhance the preservation and memorialisation of that programme in the Metaverse—if this materialises as a fully open, interoperable, and highly immersive space (1) unfettered by hegemonic regulation, and (2) characterised by ‘strategic witnessing’, ‘radical recordkeeping’, and user agency. In doing so, FA would serve as an exemplar for leftist projects globally.

Real-time EEG-based emotion recognition for neurohumanities: perspectives from principal component analysis and tree-based algorithms.

Within the field of Humanities, there is a recognized need for educational innovation, as there are currently no reported tools available that enable individuals to interact with their environment to create an enhanced learning experience in the humanities (e.g., immersive spaces). This project proposes a solution to address this gap by integrating technology and promoting the development of teaching methodologies in the humanities, specifically by incorporating emotional monitoring during the learning process of humanistic context inside an immersive space. In order to achieve this goal, a real-time emotion recognition EEG-based system was developed to interpret and classify specific emotions. These emotions aligned with the early proposal by Descartes (Passions), including admiration, love, hate, desire, joy, and sadness. This system aims to integrate emotional data into the Neurohumanities Lab interactive platform, creating a comprehensive and immersive learning environment. This work developed a ML, real-time emotion recognition model that provided Valence, Arousal, and Dominance (VAD) estimations every 5 seconds. Using PCA, PSD, RF, and Extra-Trees, the best 8 channels and their respective best band powers were extracted; furthermore, multiple models were evaluated using shift-based data division and cross-validations. After assessing their performance, Extra-Trees achieved a general accuracy of 94%, higher than the reported in the literature (88% accuracy). The proposed model provided real-time predictions of VAD variables and was adapted to classify Descartes' six main passions. However, with the VAD values obtained, more than 15 emotions can be classified (reported in the VAD emotion mapping) and extend the range of this application.

CompositingVis: Exploring Interactions for Creating Composite Visualizations in Immersive Environments.

Composite visualization represents a widely embraced design that combines multiple visual representations to create an integrated view. However, the traditional approach of creating composite visualizations in immersive environments typically occurs asynchronously outside of the immersive space and is carried out by experienced experts. In this work, we aim to empower users to participate in the creation of composite visualization within immersive environments through embodied interactions. This could provide a flexible and fluid experience with immersive visualization and has the potential to facilitate understanding of the relationship between visualization views. We begin with developing a design space of embodied interactions to create various types of composite visualizations with the consideration of data relationships. Drawing inspiration from people's natural experience of manipulating physical objects, we design interactions based on the combination of 3D manipulations in immersive environments. Building upon the design space, we present a series of case studies showcasing the interaction to create different kinds of composite visualizations in virtual reality. Subsequently, we conduct a user study to evaluate the usability of the derived interaction techniques and user experience of creating composite visualizations through embodied interactions. We find that empowering users to participate in composite visualizations through embodied interactions enables them to flexibly leverage different visualization views for understanding and communicating the relationships between different views, which underscores the potential of several future application scenarios.

Antecedents of User Experience in the Immersive Metaverse Ecosystem: Insights from Mining User Reviews

Metaverse, a digitally simulated immersive technology, has potential business value in enabling its users to execute their professional and recreational activities. It engages the users and helps them to serve their purposes. Few studies exist discussing metaverse as an immersive technology though there is a dearth of studies that empirically examine the factors associated with the corresponding user experience. We analysed over 400 thousand user reviews on 14 metaverse applications from Google Play Store to identify those factors associated with the corresponding user experience. We uncovered the pertinent factors with the help of a topic modelling technique and explained their associations with the help of Cognitive Load Theory (CLT) and Cognitive Absorption Theory (CAT) crafting a unified framework. Multiple regression models help us to validate the proposed framework. We find that sociability, density, telepresence, temporal dissociation, focused immersion, heightened enjoyment, curiosity, and playfulness positively influence the user experience of the virtual immersive space of the Metaverse. These insights can help policymakers and academicians take apt measures to make the Metaverse space more immersive and engrossing.

Exploring the Evolution of Sensemaking Strategies in Immersive Space to Think.

Existing research on immersive analytics to support the sensemaking process focuses on single-session sensemaking tasks. However, in the wild, sensemaking can take days or months to complete. In order to understand the full benefits of immersive analytic systems, we need to understand how immersive analytic systems provide flexibility for the dynamic nature of the sensemaking process. In our work, we build upon an existing immersive analytic system - Immersive Space to Think, to evaluate how immersive analytic systems can support sensemaking tasks over time. We conducted a user study with eight participants with three separate analysis sessions each. We found significant differences between analysis strategies between sessions one, two, and three, which suggest that immersive space to think can benefit analysts during multiple stages in the sensemaking process.

Embodied Provenance for Immersive Sensemaking

Immersive analytics research has explored how embodied data representations and interactions can be used to engage users in sensemaking. Prior research has broadly overlooked the potential of immersive space for supporting analytic provenance, the understanding of sensemaking processes through users’ interaction histories. We propose the concept of embodied provenance, the use of three-dimensional space and embodied interactions in supporting recalling, reproducing, annotating and sharing analysis history in immersive environments. We design a conceptual framework for embodied provenance by highlighting a set of design criteria for analytic provenance drawn from prior work and identifying essential properties for embodied provenance. We develop a prototype system in virtual reality to demonstrate the concept and support the conceptual framework by providing multiple data views and embodied interaction metaphors in a large virtual space. We present a use case scenario of energy consumption analysis and evaluated the system through a qualitative evaluation with 17 participants, which show the system’s potential for assisting analytic provenance using embodiment. Our exploration of embodied provenance through this prototype provides lessons learnt to guide the design of immersive analytic tools for embodied provenance.

Different realities: a comparison of augmented and virtual reality for the sensemaking process

Analysts perform sensemaking on large complex multimedia datasets in order to extract concepts, themes, and other kinds of insights from them. Immersive analytics, in particular, puts users in virtual environments that allow them to explore data in a unique way where they can interact and move through the data. Previous research using virtual reality immersive analytics tools found users wanting to refer to real-world objects or understand the physical world around them while continuing to perform their analysis. Therefore, we designed and ran a comparative study looking at the tradeoffs between virtual and augmented reality for our immersive analytics approach: Immersive Space to Think. Through two mixed-methods studies we found that virtual reality affords users a space where users can focus more on their task, but augmented reality allows them to use various real-world tools that can increase user satisfaction. In future immersive analytics tools, we recommend a blend of the two—augmented virtuality—with pass-through portals which allow users to see various real-world tools, such as whiteboards or desks and keyboards, while still giving themselves a space to focus.

Understanding the Effects of Smart-Speaker-Based Surveys on Panelist Experience in Immersive Consumer Testing.

Utilizing immersive technologies to reintroduce the environmental context (i.e., visual, auditory, and olfactory cues) in sensory testing has been one area of research for improving panelist engagement. The current study sought to understand whether pairing smart-speaker questionnaires in immersive spaces could positively affect the panelist experience through enhanced ecological validity. To this end, subjects performed an immersive consumer test in which responses were collected using a traditional computer-based survey, a smart-speaker approach incorporating a direct translation of the computer questionnaire into a verbal survey requiring numeric responses, and an optimized smart-speaker survey with alternative question formatting requiring spoken word-based responses. After testing, participants answered the Engagement Questionnaire (EQ) to assess participant engagement during the test, and the System Usability Scale (SUS) survey to understand the ease, and potential adoption, of using the various survey technologies in the study. Results indicated that the traditional computer-based survey was the most engaging (p < 0.001) and usable (p < 0.001), with no differences found between the two smart-speaker surveys (p = 0.803 and p = 0.577, respectively). This suggests that the proposed optimizations for the smart-speaker surveys were not robust enough to influence engagement and usability, and further research is needed to enhance their conversational capabilities.

Research on the Narrative Arts Artistic Expression of Digital Images in Museums A Case Study of H.C Andersson's House

With the rapid development of digital technology, domestic museum exhibitions gradually use digital images as the main exhibition technology, but there is still a lack of diversified and innovative application methods. Taking the digital images in the H.C Andersson's House as an example, based on the two dimensions of "human" centered immersive space and empathetic story, this paper sums up three different artistic expression methods of "switching perspectives", "interactive narration" and "immersive space", aiming to provide reference for the digital image application in domestic museum exhibitions.