A sense of spatial presence as a feeling of “being there” is an important part of the virtual experience. Navigation is a fundamental task in virtual environments and the specific navigation methods that are employed influence a user’s sense of presence. In this paper we investigate how different metaphors for vertical navigation impact spatial presence. We introduce a new elevator metaphor for...

When a virtual environment system prevents a user’s avatar hand from penetrating virtual objects, the seen and felt positions of the hand separate. We propose a new method for reducing this position discrepancy as quickly as possible without introducing perceptible discrepancy between the seen and felt motion of the user’s hand. We performed one user study to find users’ detection thresholds fo...

3D environments have been used in many applications. Besides the use of keyboard and mouse, best suited for desktop environments, other devices emerged for specific use in immersive environments. The lack of standardization in the use and in the control mapping of these devices makes the design task more challenging. We performed an exploratory study involving beginners and advanced users in th...

This article describes, in the first part, the motivations of the MultiCom group at CLIPS-IMAG laboratory in reality testing of mobile devices. The second part of the article is dedicated to the methodological aspects of data collection and analysis when evaluating the usability of a mobile device in a quasi-realistic context.

Understanding the complex relationships between data entities within an application has become essential for many applications. However because the data sets in many applications normally are large, high dimensional, posses high connectivity and are dynamic, exploring the relationships wtihin them remains a challenging task for users. In this paper we discuss the visualisation and exploration o...

Games increasingly use input devices – such as Kinect, Leap, and Move – that map the location of the player’s body into a virtual space. Designers are often faced with two options: an intuitive, direct mapping that is initially easier to learn but not suited for all tasks, or an advanced mapping that is better suited to carrying out tasks but harder to learn. In this paper we propose a method f...

For prostate therapy, the involvement of patients in the decision process is of increasing importance. However, transferring knowledge to the patient often proves to be di cult because the concerned organ is not visible and the available image data is too complex to interpret for non-physicians. To improve the situation, our work aims to developing a tool for simple knowledge transfer between p...

Exploratory gaze movements are fundamental for gathering the most relevant information regarding the partner during social interactions. We have designed and implemented a system for dynamic attention allocation which is able to actively control gaze movements during a visual action recognition task. During the observation of a partner’s reaching movement, the robot is able to contextually esti...

Many professions critically depend on people making the right decision in stressful situations, because human lives are at stake. Think of medical doctors, law enforcement, fire fighters, and the military, which often have to deal with emergency situations. It also applies to lines of work in which there is no direct emergency, but where mistakes can have disastrous consequences. Examples are p...

How do we conceptualise and design mixed reality environments (MREs)? Here we describe a first pass at a conceptual framework and use it to inform the design of different kinds of activities for children to experiment with. Our aim was to investigate how different MRE set-ups affected children’s exploratory behaviour and their understanding of them. The familiar activity of colour mixing was us...