WebGL has been the standard API for rendering graphics on the web over the years. A new technology, WebGPU, has been set to release in 2023 and utilizes many of the novel rendering approaches and features common for the native modern graphics APIs, such as Vulkan. Currently, very limited research exists regarding WebGPU's rasterization capabilities. In particular, no research exists about its capabilities when used as a rendering backend in game engines. This paper aims to investigate performance differences between WebGL and WebGPU. It is done in the context of the game engine Godot, and the measured performance is that of the CPU and GPU frame time. The results show that WebGPU performs better than WebGL when used as a rendering backend in Godot, for both the games tests and the synthetic tests. The comparisons clearly show that WebGPU performs faster in mean CPU and GPU frame time. © 2024 IEEE.

With the continuous development of extended reality (XR), encompassing augmented reality (AR), virtual reality (VR), and mixed reality (MR), the increasing application of VR, especially combined with game technology in the health area, is trending. Due to this development, academia and industry have rising research and practices focusing on VR exercise game applications and their evaluation. This paper presented a pilot study addressing the comparison of user preferences in using VR exercise games. Eight volunteering participants with VR or rowing experience were involved in the pilot study. Their responses on using different postures (standing or sitting), display devices (VR or a large screen), and game tasks (collect coins vs distance travelled) were explored, as well as feedback suggestions for the study and VR games. The pilot study revealed the opportunities and challenges to enhance the VR exercise games, user experience, and performance. It tested the feasibility and duration of each session and potential improvements that could be made for the main experiment, including the instructions, game environments, process, devices, data gathering, and analysis methods. © 2024 Copyright held by the owner/author(s).

Immersive media such as virtual reality, augmented reality, and 360° video have seen tremendous technological developments in recent years. Furthermore, the advances in head-mounted displays (HMDs) offer the users increased immersive experiences compared to conventional displays. To develop novel immersive media systems and services that satisfy the expectations of the users, it is essential to conduct subjective tests revealing users’ perceived quality of immersive media. However, due to the new viewing dimensions provided by HMDs and the potential of interacting with the content, a wide range of subjective tests are required to understand the many aspects of user behavior in and quality perception of immersive media. The ground truth obtained by such subjective tests enable the development of optimized immersive media systems that fulfill the expectations of the users. This article focuses on the consistency of 360° video quality assessment to reveal whether users’ subjective quality assessment of such immersive visual stimuli changes fundamentally over time or is kept consistent for each user. A pilot study was conducted under pandemic conditions with participants given the task of rating the quality of 360° video stimuli on an HMD in standing and seated viewing. The choice of conducting a pilot study is motivated by the fact that immersive media impose high cognitive load on the participants and the need to keep the number of participants under pandemic conditions as low as possible. To gain insight into the consistency of the participants’ 360° video assessment over time, three sessions were held for each participant and each viewing condition with long and short breaks between sessions. In particular, the opinion scores and head movements were recorded for each participant and each session in standing and seated viewing. The statistical analysis of this data leads to the conjecture that the quality rating stays consistent throughout these sessions with each participant having their own quality assessment signature. The head movements, indicating the participants’ scene exploration during the quality assessment task, also remain consistent for each participant according their individual narrower or wider scene exploration signature. These findings are more pronounced for standing viewing than for seated viewing. This work supports the role of pilot studies being a useful approach of conducting pre-tests on immersive media quality under opportunity-limited conditions and for the planning of subsequent full subjective tests with a large panel of participants. The annotated RQA360 dataset containing the data recorded in the repeated subjective tests is made publicly available to the research community. © 2024. M. Elwardy et al., licensed to EAI. This is an open access article distributed under the terms of the CC BY-NC-SA 4.0, which permits copying, redistributing, remixing, transformation, and building upon the material in any medium so long as the original work is properly cited. doi:10.4108/eetinis.v11i1.4323. All Rights Reserved.

Recent developments using extended reality (XR) technologies have allowed for increased use in healthcare in the last few years. This review paper explores how XR applications are utilized in home-based nursing education, in particular, to identify future challenges and opportunities. The systematic literature review evaluates relevant extracted papers based on publication information, XR technology used for education purposes, target users, and study design and evaluation, including sample size. The results show potential for using XR technologies in home-based nursing education. In particular, Virtual Reality (VR) has become quite popular and the most used to date. However, Augmented Reality (AR) has also emerged as an alternative for the future.

In recent years, with the rise of the ageing population worldwide, the health of the elderly has attracted increasing attention. This study explored existing extended reality (XR) game applications aiming at physical exercise for the elderly. Through the review of 1847 papers from the Scopus database, 17 articles were included. Based on these papers, we explored the existing contributions of exercise XR games for the elderly, the development opportunities and challenges of such games, and their special considerations in adapting to the characteristics and requirements of the target user. The results were organized into several perspectives: publication information and keywords, immersive technologies and game concepts, teamwork and social games, evaluation, opportunities and challenges, and adapting designs. We found the elderly interested in and accepted using XR games. The reported research results proved positive effects on such games’ physical and mental health. XR exercise games for the elderly should considerately adapt to the elder’s cognition, behaviour, and demand. Although problems existed, such as simulator sickness, safety risks, device problems, and cost, there were opportunities and space for research and future developments. Researchers and developers could refer to this paper for XR exercise games for the elderly and create or enhance future XR applications by learning from existing work. © 2023, The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG.

The recent advances in immersive technologies have been essential in the development of a wide range of novel standalone and networked immersive media applications. The concepts of virtual reality, augmented reality, and mixed reality relate to different compositions of real and computer-generated virtual objects. In this context, 360° video streaming has become increasingly popular offering improved immersive experiences when viewed on a head-mounted display (HMD). An important component in the development of novel immersive media systems are subjective tests in which participants assess the quality of experience of representative test stimuli. In this paper, the annotated ACR360 dataset is presented which is publicly available on GitHub. The ACR360 dataset contains a wide range of psychophysical and psychophysiological data that was collected in Subjective tests on 360° video quality. The test stimuli were shown on an HMD and rated according to the absolute category rating (ACR) and modified ACR (MACR) methods. To support an easy exploration and utilization of the ACR360 dataset by the research community, its structure on GitHub is described and a comprehensive illustration of analysis options are provided for each data category. The ACR360 dataset may be used for conducting meta-analysis in combination with other datasets to improve precision and to pursue research questions that cannot be answered by an individual study. © 2023 IEEE.

Virtual Reality (VR) has become an increasingly crucial aspect in both commercial and industrial settings. However, the user experience of the user interfaces and interaction methods in the VR environment is often overlooked. This paper aims to explore different menu systems, interaction methods, and the user’s sitting or standing posture on user experience and cybersickness in VR applications. An experiment with two menu systems and two interaction methods in an implemented VR application was conducted with 20 participants. The results found that traditional, top-down, panel menus with motion controls are the best combination regarding the user experience. Sitting posture provides less severe simulator sickness symptoms than standing.

The flipped classroom is an instructional model in that students learn the basic knowledge prior to the classroom meeting instead of being transmitted by teachers during the lectures. 

During the last decade, we have witnessed a rapiddevelopment of extended reality (XR) technologies such asaugmented reality (AR) and virtual reality (VR). Further, therehave been tremendous advancements in artificial intelligence(AI) and machine learning (ML). These two trends will havea significant impact on future digital societies. The vision ofan immersive, ubiquitous, and intelligent virtual space opensup new opportunities for creating an enhanced digital world inwhich the users are at the center of the development process,so-calledintelligent realities(IRs).The “Human-Centered Intelligent Realities” (HINTS) profileproject will develop concepts, principles, methods, algorithms,and tools for human-centered IRs, thus leading the wayfor future immersive, user-aware, and intelligent interactivedigital environments. The HINTS project is centered aroundan ecosystem combining XR and communication paradigms toform novel intelligent digital systems.HINTS will provide users with new ways to understand,collaborate with, and control digital systems. These novelways will be based on visual and data-driven platforms whichenable tangible, immersive cognitive interactions within realand virtual realities. Thus, exploiting digital systems in a moreefficient, effective, engaging, and resource-aware condition.Moreover, the systems will be equipped with cognitive featuresbased on AI and ML, which allow users to engage with digitalrealities and data in novel forms. This paper describes theHINTS profile project and its initial results. ©2023, Copyright held by the authors   

Virtual reality, augmented reality, and mixed reality (VR/AR/MR) as information and communication technologies have been recognised and implemented in healthcare in recent years. One of the popular application ways is games, due to the potential benefits of providing an engaging and immersive experience in a virtual environment. This study presents a systematic literature review that evaluates the state-of-the-art on VR/AR/MR game applications in healthcare by collecting and analysing related journal and conference papers published from 2014 through to the first half of 2020. After retrieving more than 3,000 papers from six databases, 88 articles, from both computer science and medicine, were selected and analysed in the review. The articles are classified and summarised based on their (1) publication information, (2) design, implementation, and evaluation, and (3) application. The presented review is beneficial for both researchers and developers interested in exploring current research and future trends in VR/AR/MR in healthcare. © 2022 Association for Computing Machinery.