The lack of efficient and easy to use authoring tools for virtual reality based contents is considered as one of the main obstacle to making virtual reality more popular and useful means of digital media. In this paper we suggest a new approach to authoring virtual reality based contents, a method named immersive authoring and testing, which allows the users to construct and develop virtual rea...

Groups of schizophrenics with and without auditory hallucinations and nonpsychotic controls were administered a test of vividness of auditory imagery, participated in a listening task, and were measured on their ability to assess the accuracy of their auditory perceptions. In accordance with the hypothesis, the hallucinators tended to have high, and the nonhallucinators low vividness of auditor...

In this study, we investigated the relationships between observed social withdrawal (Positive and Negative Syndrome Scale [PANSS] Passive Social Withdrawal and PANSS Active Social Avoidance), subjectively experienced social withdrawal (Social Functioning Scale [SFS] Withdrawal and SFS Interpersonal Behavior), and their associations to the underlying psychological patterns of Object Relations an...

Virtual reality (VR) has slowly embedded itself into modern society; it has transitioned from the prestigious research laboratory to everyday life as virtual environments (VE) are being used for entertainment and as an educational tool. How well can current virtual reality hardware display 3D objects? This is the question that we sought to answer with our study, as we tested the ability of the ...

With a focus on ecological validity and behavioural measures, our interest is in reality testing of applications based on new or emerging technologies. In particular, mobile and entertainment applications are simply not amenable to classic laboratory testing. Furthermore, standard usability measures of efficiency and effectiveness are not always relevant to these new situations and environments...

Recent research suggests that unconventional beliefs are locatable within a generic anomalous belief category. This notion derives from the observation that apparently dissimilar beliefs share fundamental, core characteristics (i.e., contradiction of orthodox scientific understanding of the universe and defiance of conventional understanding of reality). The present paper assessed the suppositi...

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This paper briefly justifies the relevance of empirical studies involving users (either controlled or exploratory experiments) as methods that should be used to study and evaluate usability in Virtual Environments. The paper also briefly presents some examples of such experiments that have been performed in order to study user performance while navigating in a Virtual Environment in different p...

Immersive virtual environments (VEs) offer interactive, real-time visualization capabilities for engineers, architects, and scientists. This paper presents VirtualSAP, an immersive VE application allowing users to assess building structures and their response to various environmental conditions through an interactive designbuild-test-redesign cycle. Virtual-SAP has three distinct user interface...

A huge amount of research in academia and industry has focused on the hardware and technological side of information systems, while the role of emotions in the way these systems are utilized has been largely neglected. However, recent developments in other disciplines have suggested that emotions play a significant role in decision-making. To address this state of affairs, this study draws upon...