Recent developments in Virtual Reality (VR) technology present a tremendous opportunity for the tourism industry. This research aims to better understand how the VR experience may influence travel decision making by investigating spatial presence in VR environments and its impact on attitudes toward tourism destinations. Based on a study involving virtual walkthrough of tourism destinations wit...

During the past decade, virtual reality (VR) has gained recognition as a means of attenuating pain during medical procedures. However, while investigators have examined the effects of virtual environments on level of distraction, subjective pain intensity, and brain activity, there have been only a handful of investigations into the neurobiological mechanisms associated with VR's efficacy. In a...

Mechanical repositioning is a locomotion technique that uses a locomotion interface to cancel the displacement of a user for walking on the spot. This technique is especially useful for virtual reality (VR) systems that use large-scale projective displays for visualization. In this paper, we present a machine learning approach for developing a mechanical repositioning technique based on a 1-D t...

Surgical training systems based on virtual reality (VR) and simulation techniques may represent a more cost-effective and efficient alternative to traditional training methods. This paper describes a training system ESSO of virtual arthroscopic knee surgery. It is developed as a joint project between the Chinese University of Hong Kong and Tsinghua University. An overview of the current state o...

Virtual reality (VR) technology holds promise as a virtual prototyping (VP) tool for mechanical assembly; however, several developmental challenges still need to be addressed before VP applications can successfully be integrated into the product realization process. This paper describes the development of System for Haptic Assembly and Realistic Prototyping (SHARP), a portable virtual assembly ...

As the design, development and execution of manufacturing processes continue to spread out across the world, globally distributed enterprises demand new paradigms. Distance collaboration tools are becoming increasingly important in order to maintain synergies between spatially distributed entities enabling effective cooperation over large distances. Virtual Reality (VR) technologies offer uniqu...

This paper describes a publicly available virtual reality (VR) system, GNU/MAVERIK, which forms one component of a complete VR operating system. We give an overview of the architecture of MAVERIK, and show how it is designed to use application data in an intelligent way, via a simple, yet powerful, callback mechanism that supports an object-oriented framework of classes, objects, and methods. E...

This paper describes a telerobotic system operated through a virtual reality (VR) interface. A least squares method is used to find the transformation mapping, from the virtual to real environments. Results revealed an average transformation error of 3mm. The system was tested for the task of planning minimum time shaking trajectories to discharge the contents of a suspicious package onto a wor...

This paper focuses on the application of Virtual Reality (VR) technologies and Virtual Environments (VEs) on the industrial field regarding safety. The issues of the industrial field are initially presented, focusing on the safety tasks currently performed in the sector. The Virtual Reality technology’s innovative character is then presented, focusing on how this technology can by itself aid th...

Virtual Reality (VR) technology holds promise as a virtual prototyping tool for mechanical assembly; however, several developmental challenges still need to be addressed before virtual prototyping applications can successfully be integrated into the product realization process. This paper describes the development of SHARP (System for Haptic Assembly & Realistic Prototyping), a portable VR inte...