ABSTRACT
Children are one of the groups most influenced by COVID-19-related social distancing, and a lack of contact with peers can limit their opportunities to develop social and collaborative skills. However, remote socialization and collaboration as an alternative approach is still a great challenge for children. This paper presents MR.Brick, a Mixed Reality (MR) educational game system that helps children adapt to remote collaboration. A controlled experimental study involving 24 children aged six to ten was conducted to compare MR.Brick with the traditional video game by measuring their social and collaborative skills and analyzing their multi-modal playing behaviours. The results showed that MR.Brick was more conducive to children's remote collaboration experience than the traditional video game. Given the lack of training systems designed for children to collaborate remotely, this study may inspire interaction design and educational research in related fields. © 2023 ACM.
ABSTRACT
Understanding a concept that people cannot observe directly in real life is always challenging in education. It could be even more difficult for public health education topics such as viruses or bacteria. However, public health education is critical for understanding the knowledge of the virus in the age of COVID-19. Thus, this paper proposes a distributed mixed reality environment to enhance public health education in the internet of things (IoT) context. We introduce the design methodology based on the mixed reality interaction characteristics, the implementation, and the initial evaluation. © 2023 Author(s).
ABSTRACT
Mingling, the activity of ad-hoc, private, opportunistic conversations ahead of, during, or after breaks, is an important socializing activity for attendees at scheduled events, such as in-person conferences. The Covid-19 pandemic had a dramatic impact on the way conferences are organized, so that most of them now take place in a hybrid mode where people can either attend on-site or remotely. While on-site attendees can resume in-person mingling, hybrid modes make it challenging for remote attendees to mingle with on-site peers. In addressing this problem, we propose a collaborative mixed-reality (MR) concept, including a prototype, called HybridMingler. This is a distributed MR system supporting ambient awareness and allowing both on-site and remote conference attendees to virtually mingle. HybridMingler aims to provide both on-site and remote attendees with a spatial sense of co-location in the very same venue location, thus ultimately improving perceived presence. © 2023 Owner/Author.
ABSTRACT
Virtual, augmented, and immersive reality opens a world of possibilities in education by allowing students to recreate authentic situations, such as operating machinery, assembling a product, or training tool handling, to mention a few. In the TEC21 educational model, the core is the challenge: A project with a real-world challenge assigned by the training partner results in students offering solution proposals.The trigger that accelerated the development of virtual, augmented, and immersive reality activities in distance learning was COVID-19 confinement. During this, these technologies recreated the laboratory and its facilities' learning through augmented reality (AR) and virtual reality (VR) experiences.Using these technologies in the classroom allows students to achieve a great learning experience and develop skills for postgraduate studies and professional futures.Furthermore, now that we have returned to our physical facilities and laboratories, we can accelerate the learning obtained at the training partners' facilities, recreating processes and machinery through these immersive technologies and a hybrid experience for our students.The present research shows the activity learning design process and the statistical treatment of the data to provide continuous feedback during the activity;we examine the three transcendental variables in the educational process: The learning (academic rigor), the development of competencies, and the involvement or immersion of the students in the classroom. © 2023 IEEE.
ABSTRACT
The coronavirus disease 2019 pandemic not only precipitated a digital revolution but also led to one of the largest scientific collaborative open-source initiatives. The EXaSCale smArt pLatform Against paThogEns for CoronaVirus (EXSCALATE4CoV) consortium, led by Dompé farmaceutici S.p.A., brought together 18 global organizations to counter international pandemics more rapidly and efficiently. The consortium also partnered with Nanome, an extended reality software company whose software facilitates the visualization, modification, and simulation of molecules via augmented reality, mixed reality, and virtual reality applications. To characterize the molecular structure of severe acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus 2 (SARS-CoV-2) and to identify promising drug targets, the EXSCALATE4CoV team utilized methods such as homology modeling, molecular dynamics simulations, high-throughput virtual screening, docking, and other computational procedures. Nanome provided analysis of those computational procedures and supplied virtual reality headsets to help scientists better understand and interact with the molecular dynamics and key chemical interactions of SARS-CoV-2. Nanome's collaborative ideation platform enables scientific breakthroughs across research institutions in the fight against the coronavirus pandemic and other diseases. © 2023, The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG.
ABSTRACT
In 2020, a new coronavirus swept the world, and the advent of this disease has a huge impact on our social and economic development. Due to the limited medical resources and regional differences, this model of virtual medicine becomes more valuable. In this paper, we create a virtual medical space based on a metaverse in order to investigate whether the medical model can be freely transformed between virtual and reality. In this process, I first describe different scenarios of virtual medical care in mixed reality, and then we use one of them as an example to develop a medical device. Then we designed the software and hardware of the product and performed the user experience, it includes the interaction and usage scenarios that affect the user. Finally, this medical device will be demonstrated by user experience and feedback. © 2023 The authors and IOS Press.
ABSTRACT
Metaverse is defined as a collection of technology gadgets and metaverse connected to IoT, Blockchain, Artificial Intelligence, and all the other tech industries including educational. In particular, the big success of the metaverse in the recent era is in the educational sector, metaverse resolved many difficulties in the education domain. Especially, in the situation of covid 19 people continued there all the educational things virtually using metaverse technologies. At this moment it was only a sector that was not hampered by the reason of covid 19, everyone did their educational work online instead of offline. Metaverse uses artificial intelligence and IoT technology to build a digital virtual world where you can safely and freely engage in social and educational activities that transcend the limits of the real world, and the application of these latest technologies will be expedited. In this paper, we are going to introduce the future of the metaverse, including its history, explanation, and shared features. Then, we will describe what technologies the metaverse is using and metaverse potentiality in education, the metaverse in education is clearly defined, and a detailed framework of the metaverse in education is proposed, along with in-depth discussions of its features. © 2023 Global IT Research Institute (GiRI).
ABSTRACT
Recently, during the COVID-19 pandemic, distance education became mainstream. Many students were not prepared for this situation—they lacked equipment or were not even connected to the Internet. Schools and government institutions had to react quickly to allow students to learn remotely. They had to provide students with equipment (e.g., computers, tablets, and goggles) but also provide them with access to the Internet and other necessary tools. On the other hand, teachers were trying to adopt new technologies in the teaching process to enable more interactivity, mitigate feelings of isolation and disconnection, and enhance student engagement. New technologies, including Virtual Reality (VR), Augmented Reality (AR), Mixed Reality (MR), Extended Reality (XR, so-called Metaverse), Big Data, Blockchain, and Free Space Optics (FSO) changed learning, teaching, and assessing. Despite that, some tools were implemented fast, and the COVID-19 pandemic was the trigger for this process;most of these technologies will be used further, even in classroom teaching in both schools and universities. This paper presents a concise review of the emerging technologies applied in distance education. The main emphasis was placed on their influence on the efficiency of the learning process and their psychological impact on users. It turned out that both students and teachers were satisfied with remote learning, while in the case of undergraduate children and high-school students, parents very often expressed their dissatisfaction. The limitation of the availability of remote learning is related to access to stable Internet and computer equipment, which turned out to be a rarity. In the current social context, the obtained results provided valuable insights into factors affecting the acceptance and emerging technologies applied in distance education. Finally, this paper suggests a research direction for the development of effective remote learning techniques. © 2023 by the authors.
ABSTRACT
Existing challenges in surgical education (See one, do one, teach one) as well as the COVID-19 pandemic make it necessary to develop new ways for surgical training. Therefore, this work describes the implementation of a scalable remote solution called "TeleSTAR" using immersive, interactive and augmented reality elements which enhances surgical training in the operating room. The system uses a full digital surgical microscope in the context of Ear-Nose-Throat surgery. The microscope is equipped with a modular software augmented reality interface consisting an interactive annotation mode to mark anatomical landmarks using a touch device, an experimental intraoperative image-based stereo-spectral algorithm unit to measure anatomical details and highlight tissue characteristics. The new educational tool was evaluated and tested during the broadcast of three live XR-based three-dimensional cochlear implant surgeries. The system was able to scale to five different remote locations in parallel with low latency and offering a separate two-dimensional YouTube stream with a higher latency. In total more than 150 persons were trained including healthcare professionals, biomedical engineers and medical students.
ABSTRACT
The substantial applicability of technological advancements to the healthcare sector and its allied segments are on the verge of questioning the abilities of hospitals, medical institutions, doctors and clinical pathologists in delivering world class healthcare facilities to the global patient community. Investigative works pertinent to the role played of technological advancements in the healthcare sector motivated this work to be undertaken. Part-I of the review addressed the applicable role play of advanced technologies such as Artificial intelligence, Big-data, Block chain, Open-Source and Cloud Computing Technologies, etc., to the healthcare sector and its allied segments. The current Part-II manuscript is critically focused upon reviewing the sustainable role of additional disrupting technologies such as Robotics, Drones, 3D-Printing, IoT, Virtual/Augmented/Mixed Reality, etc., to uncover the vast number of implicit problems encountered by the clinical community. Investigations governing the deployment of these technologies in various allied healthcare segments are highlighted in this manuscript. Subsequently, the unspoken challenges and remedial future directions are discussed thereof.
ABSTRACT
The primary sector is facing a series of challenges such as climate change, overpopulation, freshwater scarcity, energy poverty, urbanization and an ageing population. On top of that, the COVID-19 pandemic disrupted the sector even more. Extended Reality (XR) is a promising technology that can enable the solving of the aforementioned challenges. The main aim of this study was to analyze the use of XR in agriculture, livestock farming, and aquaculture, as well as to identify trends and gaps in its use. Therefore, a literature review was conducted to classify relevant research studies according to XR use in terms of focus area and application type, and human – machine interaction in relation to XR type, XR viewer device, and XR controller type. The results indicated that there is huge potential from the application of XR in the primary sector, even if this field of studies is at a premature level. Moreover, there are many ways and devices that allow human-machine interaction in XR environments for agriculture, livestock farming, and aquaculture. Further research is needed to solve health and privacy and security issues and achieve seamless and more immersive interaction in XR environments, thereby enabling users to take full benefit of XR technology in the primary sector. © 2022
ABSTRACT
COVID-19 has taken educational protocols to different track. Online education is the way to execute process smoothly. There are various tools that are providing services to fill the pain points. Role of emerging technologies can't be denied. Extended and mixed reality plays a vital role here. Our purpose is to analyze the same in this paper. Second objective of this paper is to develop novel framework to define extended and mixed reality for online learning Fig.∼\ref{fig1}. Testing has been done on four Indian universities and schools to identify the effectiveness of proposed framework. © 2022 IEEE.
ABSTRACT
Extended reality is known as a technical term encompassing augmented, virtual, and mixed reality. It is a niche technology domain that finds its way through virtually every sector, from academia to businesses and industries. Its success is due to the level of immersion it brings to the user. The COVID-19 pandemic, with its unprecedented consequences and lockdowns, amplified the advantages of immersive education and learning through extended reality technology. The technology extension to smartphones and Web pages has enabled its accessibility to a level expected to grow beyond the pandemic era. Due to the rural locations of farms, agriculture is a great candidate where extended reality technology can strengthen its reach to a more enormous population for education, promotion, and outreach. The current study, at the intersection of the agricultural sector and extended reality technology, presents the development of a three-dimensional interactive game to promote the Tennessee corn. The game is developed in Unity engine (version 2020.3.12). It is a single-player, first-person perspective game, where the arrow keys make a farmer character navigate turns and obstacles within a corn maze. Scarecrows will appear over the game course and force the player to answer a trivia question about corn production and usage. The player moves forward unchanged with correct answers to the trivia questions;however, the player will lose a life from their five-life total with an incorrect answer. The goal is to escape the maze by correctly answering trivia questions, navigating the maze, and finding bonus lives scattered throughout. The study discusses the design process of player movements, camera movements, objects interactions, and other game-play mechanics. With our target audience primarily set to middle school students in rural areas, the game was successfully developed and released as a Web-based game (https://bar.rancsgroup.com/TheMaze/ ). Our current plan is to extend the game with optional difficulty levels as well as release smartphones applications through major platforms. © 2023, The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Singapore Pte Ltd.
ABSTRACT
Metaverse is invading the educational sector and will change human-computer interaction techniques. Prominent technology executives are developing novel ways to turn the Metaverse into a learning environment, considering the rapid growth of technology. Since the COVID-19 outbreak, people have grown accustomed to teleworking, telemedicine, and numerous other forms of distance interaction. Recently, the Metaverse has been the focus of many educators. With Facebook's statement that it was rebranding and promoting itself as Meta, this field saw a surge in interest in the areas of computer science and education. There is a literature gap in studying the Metaverse's role in education. This article is a systematic review following the PRISMA framework that reviews the role of the Metaverse in education to shrink the literature gap. It presents various educational uses to aid future research in this field. Additionally, it demonstrates how enabling technologies like extended reality (XR) and the internet of everything (IoE) will significantly impact educational services in the Metaverses of the future of teaching and learning. The article also outlines key challenges, ethical issues, and potential threats to using the Metaverse for education to offer a road map for future research that will investigate how the Metaverse will improve learning and teaching experiences.
ABSTRACT
Introduction: Interacting with animals has been demonstrated to possess the healing benefits to humans. However, there are limitations in physical interaction due to COVID-19 and safety issues. Therefore, as an alternative, we created mixed-reality (MR)-based human-animal interaction (HAI) content and experimentally verified its effect on mental stress reduction. Methods: We created three types of interactive content: observing the movement of a non-reactive virtual cat, interacting with a virtual cat whose responses can be seen, and interacting with a virtual cat whose responses can be both seen and heard. The experiment was performed by 30 healthy young women, and a mental arithmetic task was used to induce mild mental stress before experiencing each content. During the experiment, the subject's electrocardiogram was continuously recorded, and the psychological state was evaluated through a questionnaire. Results: The results showed that MR-based virtual cat content significantly reduces mental stress and induces positive emotions after stressful situations. In particular, when the virtual cat provided audiovisual feedback, the activation amount of the parasympathetic nervous system and the increase of positive emotions were the greatest. Discussion: Based on this encouraging research result, this method should be further investigated to see if it can replace real HAI for human mental health management.
ABSTRACT
Over the last several years, remote collaboration has been getting more attention in the research community because of the COVID-19 pandemic. In previous studies, researchers have investigated the effect of adding visual communication cues or shared views in collaboration, but there has not been any previous study exploring the influence between them. In this paper, we investigate the influence of view types on the use of visual communication cues. We compared the use of the three visual cues (hand gesture, a pointer with hand gesture, and sketches with hand gesture) across two view types (dependent and independent views), respectively. We conducted a user study, and the results showed that hand gesture and sketches with the hand gesture cues were well matched with the dependent view condition, and using a pointer with the hand gesture cue was suited to the independent view condition. With the dependent view, the hand gesture and sketch cues required less mental effort for collaborative communication, had better usability, provided better message understanding, and increased feeling of co-presence compared to the independent view. Since the dependent view supported the same viewpoint between the remote expert and a local worker, the local worker could easily understand the remote expert's hand gestures. In contrast, in the independent view case, when they had different viewpoints, it was not easy for the local worker to understand the remote expert's hand gestures. The sketch cue had a benefit of showing the final position and orientation of the manipulating objects with the dependent view, but this benefit was less obvious in the independent view case (which provided a further view compared to the dependent view) because precise drawing in the sketches was difficult from a distance. On the contrary, a pointer with the hand gesture cue required less mental effort to collaborate, had better usability, provided better message understanding, and an increased feeling of co-presence in the independent view condition than in the dependent view condition. The pointer cue could be used instead of a hand gesture in the independent view condition because the pointer could still show precise pointing information regardless of the view type. © 2023 Tech Science Press. All rights reserved.
ABSTRACT
The term Metaverse ("meta" defined as beyond, transcendence or virtuality, and "verse" meaning universe or world) denotes a "virtual reality space" for anatomy teaching. To ascertain how many anatomists are familiar or are using this adjunct in teaching, we conducted a short survey at the 2022 annual meeting of the American Association of Clinical Anatomists (AACA). Interestingly, only six respondents (9.4%) had used a Metaverse for teaching anatomy. Moreover, the vast majority of attendees were anatomy educators or basic science faculty, but not practicing physicians/surgeons or other actively practicing health care professionals; a group where this technology has been used much more commonly. The present manuscript was authored by anatomy educators, practicing physicians and other actively practicing health care professionals with backgrounds in diverse medical fields, that is, anatomists, medical doctors, physician assistants, dentists, occupational therapists, physical therapists, chiropractors, veterinarians, and medical students. Many of these authors have used or have been exposed to a Metaverse in the clinical realm. Therefore, the aim of the paper is to better understand those who are knowledgeable of a Metaverse and its use in anatomy education, and to provide ways forward for using such technology in this discipline.
ABSTRACT
Digital transformation is radically impacting on society and market by disclosing unexpected implications for scholars and practitioners. As enablers of a pervasive innovation process, digital transformation relies on different categories of digital technologies with a breakthrough profile. Among them, phygital arises as a promising topic defined as the use of technology to bridge the digital with the physical world with the purpose of providing a unique interactive experience for the user. Due the actuality of the issue, the literature on phygital is fragmented and far from a full understanding of its meaning and implications. Moving from these premises, our research attempts to analyse the current state of the debate about the promising role of phygital environment to identify how digital technologies are transforming physical world. At this aim, a critical literature review is performed to identify how the customer experience is undergoing a renaissance due to the Covid-19 pandemic that forced organisations to improve the customer experiences. Our findings allow to identify main trends in the academic debate as grouped into five main clusters, related to the adoption of phygital technologies for: i) Marketing and Consumers' Behaviour;ii) Cultural Heritage, Tourism and Urban Development;iii) Education and Learning;iv) Social issues and Politics;v) Technical and Legal Issues. These areas are linked together showing how the different phygital environments lead to the provisions of novel and immersive experience for customers involved into strategic industries such as retail, tourism and education. Directions for future research and management implications are finally provided. © 2023 Elsevier Inc.
ABSTRACT
Virtual and augmented reality have been used to diagnose and treat several mental health disorders for decades. Technological advances in these fields have facilitated the availability of commercial solutions for end customers and practitioners. However, there are still some barriers and limitations that prevent these technologies from being widely used by professionals on a daily basis. In addition, the COVID-19 pandemic has exposed a variety of new scenarios in which these technologies could play an essential role, like providing remote treatment. Disorders that traditionally had received less attention are also getting in the spotlight, such as depression or obsessive-compulsive disorder. Improvements in equipment and hardware, like Mixed Reality Head Mounted Displays, could help open new opportunities in the mental health field. Extended reality (XR) is an umbrella term meant to comprise Virtual reality (VR), mixed reality (MR), and augmented reality (AR). While XR applications are eminently visual, other senses are being explored in literature around multisensory interactions, such as auditory, olfactory, or haptic feedback. Applying such stimuli within XR experiences around mental disorders is still under-explored and could greatly enrich the therapeutic experience. This manuscript reviews recent research regarding the use of XR for mental health scenarios, highlighting trends, and potential applications as well as areas for improvement. It also discusses future challenges and research areas in upcoming topics such as the use of wearables, multisensory, and multimodal interaction. The main goal of this paper is to unpack how these technologies could be applied to XR scenarios for mental health to exploit their full potential and follow the path of other health technologies by promoting personalized medicine.
ABSTRACT
Digital transformation is radically impacting on society and market by disclosing unexpected implications for scholars and practitioners. As enablers of a pervasive innovation process, digital transformation relies on different categories of digital technologies with a breakthrough profile. Among them, phygital arises as a promising topic defined as the use of technology to bridge the digital with the physical world with the purpose of providing a unique interactive experience for the user. Due the actuality of the issue, the literature on phygital is fragmented and far from a full understanding of its meaning and implications. Moving from these premises, our research attempts to analyse the current state of the debate about the promising role of phygital environment to identify how digital technologies are transforming physical world. At this aim, a critical literature review is performed to identify how the customer experience is undergoing a renaissance due to the Covid-19 pandemic that forced organisations to improve the customer experiences. Our findings allow to identify main trends in the academic debate as grouped into five main clusters, related to the adoption of phygital technologies for: i) Marketing and Consumers' Behaviour;ii) Cultural Heritage, Tourism and Urban Development;iii) Education and Learning;iv) Social issues and Politics;v) Technical and Legal Issues. These areas are linked together showing how the different phygital environments lead to the provisions of novel and immersive experience for customers involved into strategic industries such as retail, tourism and education. Directions for future research and management implications are finally provided.