This qualitative, exploratory study investigated the design strengths and concerns of OpenCourseware (OCW) for higher education based on user experience, using the translated Chinese website of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology OCW as a venue for exploration (http://www.myoops.org/twocw/mit/index.htm). Fortytwo college students, professors, and e-learning experts in Taiwan were recruite...

The nonverbal behaviors of conversational partners reflect their conversational footing, signaling who in the group are the speakers, addressees, bystanders, and overhearers. Many applications of virtual reality (VR) will involve multiparty conversations with virtual agents and avatars of others where appropriate signaling of footing will be critical. In this paper, we introduce computational m...

We introduce a portable, generalizable, and accessible open-source framework (SimVis) for performing a large variety of Mixed Reality (MR) research. Using the framework, we conduct a user study whose results explore the differences between Brown’s CAVE and Brown’s YURT in performing insight-based tasks on volume data. The results of our user study (and future experiments using our framework) ai...

This paper provides a description of outdoor visualisation of environmental corrosion data. This system was developed to aid in the visual understanding of data from wireless sensors used to monitor large structures. Due to the laborious manual inspections required for large structures (such as bridges), wireless environmental sensors have been designed to automate this process. Our system visu...

The Distributed Legible City (DLC) is an interactive multi-media art installation enabling a number of ‘cyclists’ to participate in a shared virtual environment. In this paper we describe the evolution of the DLC guided by ethnographic study. We consider the implications and problems associated with designing a virtual environment where the requirements to ‘support social interaction’ are ambig...

Usability has become one of the key ingredients in making virtual reality (VR) systems work, and a big part of a usable VR system is in the design of effective interface/interaction schemes. During the past few years, several empirical studies have been conducted to evaluate the usability of generic interaction techniques in the context of virtual environment design. As a continued effort in th...

A useful function of augmented reality (AR) systems is their ability to visualize occluded infrastructure directly in a user’s view of the environment. This is especially important for our application context, which utilizes mobile AR for navigation and other operations in an urban environment. A key problem in the AR field is how to best depict occluded objects in such a way that the viewer ca...

Recent studies on virtual teams reveal that team virtuality may be considered from different levels which have a considerable impact on team processes and management. However, as a recent concept introduced to virtual team literature, virtuality and its effects on team effectiveness are still under studied. The purpose of this paper is twofold. On the one hand, it aims to define the concept of ...

The discrepancy of continuously decreasing clinical training opportunities and increasing complexity of interventions in surgery has led to the development of different training options like anatomical models, computer-based simulators or cadaver trainings. However, trainees, following this training and ultimately performing patient treatment, still face a steep learning curve. To address this ...

Modeling of realistic garments is essential for creating believable virtual environments. Sketch-based modeling of garments presents an appealing, easy to use alternative to the established modeling approaches which are time consuming and require significant tailoring expertise. Unfortunately, the results created using existing sketch-based methods lack realism. Driven by human perception of ga...