Firstly, I will suggest here that although there is now a common practice of associating VR with the theatre as a form of representation with stories, plots and characters, VR actually has more in common with performance (and here I mean performance art or ritual rather than the conventional theatre), music and the visual arts. This is because what we could call the ‘classical’ theatre establis...

Objective. The purpose of this study was to investigate whether short sleepers (<6 hrs) who worked the non-day-shift were at greater likelihood of reporting hypertension and if these associations varied by individuals' ethnicity. Methods. Analysis was based on the 2010 National Health Interview Survey (NHIS). A total of 59,199 American adults provided valid data for the present analyses (mean a...

This paper presents an empirical study on two different navigation styles within QuickTime VR panorama scenes. In one style, the users would jump from one position in the scene to the next while maintaining their direction of view. In the second style, the users would jump from one position to the next and reverse their direction of view. The results show that participants preferred the later s...

Computer games have become part of children’s culture. Children and adolescents are quite happy to spend many hours playing a game just for the fun of it. On the other hand educational syllabus may look quite dry to children and adolescents. In this paper, we describe VR-ENGAGE, a virtual reality game that has been constructed for teaching geography to students in a motivating way. Thus the cap...

The PARIS (Personal Augmented Reality Immersive System) is a new VR display device that was first prototyped as a virtual device in a CAVE, to aid in the development process. This initial prototyping in VR allowed the designers to save time and money, and to garner valuable feedback from prospective users, before finally committing the design to hardware.

In the United States today, we know a great deal about the burden of high blood pressure (BP) and the inadequacy of its prevention and control at the national level.1 The National Health and Nutrition Examination Survey (NHANES), created through authorizing legislation of the National Health Survey Act of 1956, collects directly measured and selfreported data relevant to biological risk factors...

The purpose of this research was to investigate the associations between misperception of body weight and sociodemographic factors such as food stamp participation status, income, education, and race/ethnicity. National Health and Nutrition Examination Survey (NHANES) data from 1999-2004 and multivariate logistic regression are used to estimate how sociodemographic factors are associated with (...

This paper presents an account of a project jointly undertaken from 2001 to 2003 by UCLA and the Ocean Institute (Dana Point, California) to create an interactive virtual reality exhibit about archaeological objects found at Port Royal, Jamaica. The intended users of the exhibit were schoolchildren and other visitors to the Ocean Institute. The goal of the project was to facilitate learning thr...

The concept of "presence" is a major part of the discourse of VR. Creating a sense of presence can be crucial to the effectiveness of museum exhibits and VR presentations. Sound can play various roles in technology-based presentations, by creating or enhancing a sense of presence, and providing a continuity of experience. This paper discusses these points and how presence and sonic identificati...