Games arguably have the most impressive success of any computer-based application and it would be useful to be able to extract some of the successful features of games for use in different application areas. Whilst games are clearly a multi-faceted phenomenon, when talking about games, gamers and reviewers often refer to the immersive experience of the game as being of particular importance. Mo...

As lithography quickly approaches its limits with current technologies, a host of new ideas is being proposed in hopes of pushing lithography to new levels of performance. The work presented in this thesis explores the use of an immersion scheme to improve the performance of a maskless lithographic technique known as Zone-Plate-Array Lithography (ZPAL). This is believed to be the first implemen...

The purpose of this study was to examine the influence of waterproof covering on finger skin temperature (FST) and hand pain during immersion test for diagnosing hand-arm vibration syndrome complying with the proposal of the International Organization for Standardization (ISO/ CD14835-1, 2001) for measurement procedure. Six healthy male subjects took part in the immersion tests and immersed the...

The Electronic Visualization Laboratory (EVL) at the University of Illinois at Chicago (UIC) has partnered with dozens of computational scientists and engineers to create visualization and virtual reality (VR) devices and applications for collaborative exploration of scientific and engineering data. Since 1995, our research and development activities have incorporated emerging high bandwidth ne...

Pulmonary oedema of immersion is a rare complication of scuba diving. A case and brief discussion of the differential diagnosis and pathophysiology are presented. Onset of symptoms typically occurs during the dive, and is characterized by dyspnoea, cough and frothy sputum. Spontaneous recovery frequently occurs once the diver leaves the water. If investigated, the findings are of hypoxaemia and...

Arterial shear stress is a potent stimulus to vascular adaptation in humans. Typically, increases in retrograde shear have been found to acutely impair vascular function while increases in antegrade shear enhance function. We hypothesized that blood flow and shear stress through the brachial and carotid arteries would change in a similar manner in response to water immersion, an intervention wh...

OBJECTIVE Stories can serve as powerful tools for health interventions. Story immersion refers to the experience of being absorbed in a story. This is among the first studies to analyze story immersion's role in health videogames among children by addressing two main questions: Will children be more immersed when the main characters are similar to them? Do increased levels of immersion relate t...

We report on the light confinement effect observed in nonideally shaped (i.e., nonspherical) nanoscale solid immersion lenses (SIL). To investigate this effect, nanostructures of various shapes are fabricated by electron-beam lithography. When completely melted in reflow, these noncircular pillars become spherical, while incomplete melting results in nonspherically shaped SILs. Optical characte...

A (loopless) digraph H is strongly immersed in a digraph G if the vertices of H are mapped to distinct vertices of G, and the edges of H are mapped to directed paths joining the corresponding pairs of vertices of G, in such a way that the paths used are pairwise edge-disjoint, and do not pass through vertices of G that are images of vertices of H. A digraph has cutwidth at most k if its vertice...

In a Virtual Environment (VE), Immersion, defined in technical terms, is capable of producing a sensation of Presence, the sensation of being there (part of the VE), as regards the user (Ijsselsteijn & Riva, 2003). Presence is indeed, historically, at the core of Virtual Reality (VR). Presence has often be conceived as a sign of "ecological validity" of VR devices, also as a sign of potential p...