We are experiencing an upcoming trend of using head mounted display systems in games and serious games, which is likely to become an established practice in the near future. While these systems provide highly immersive experiences, many users have been reporting discomfort symptoms, such as nausea, sickness, and headaches, among others. When using VR for health applications, this is more critical, since the discomfort may interfere a lot in treatments. In this work we discuss possible causes of these issues, and present possible solutions as design guidelines that may mitigate them. In this context, we go deeper within a dynamic focus solution to reduce discomfort in immersive virtual environments, when using first-person navigation. This solution applies an heuristic model of visual attention that works in real time. This work also discusses a case study (as a first-person spatial shooter demo) that applies this solution and the proposed design guidelines.

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This work presents a study for assessing the technology acceptance of a contact tracing app, also proposed by us, which is a hybrid crowdsensing application (opportunistic and participatory). The goal of the app is that users are notified if they were in contact with others infected. It also allows creating a heat map identifying streets, squares, and commercial locations to which contaminated users were, allowing more assertive hygiene actions and eliminating infectious disease outbreaks. Our methodology aimed on finding whether people would be willing to share their location, as well as their health issues related to COVID-19. It is composed by a survey for verifying the interest of the proposed application; the prototype of the application; and the use of Technology Acceptance Model (TAM). We can see that the vast majority of respondents to the first survey were interested in using a contact tracking application, even though they need to share their location and report when they become infected. In addition, the proposed RISCOVID application proved to be accepted for use by participants in the second survey.

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Figure 1: JECRIPE -a game for children with special needs AbtractThere are not many initiatives in the area of game development for children with special needs, specially children with Down syndrome. The major purpose of our research is to promote cognitive development of disabled children in the context of inclusive education. In order to do so, we address aspects of interaction, communication and game design in stimulating selected cognitive abilities. By using a Human-Computer Interaction method based on the Inspection of Evaluation, it was possible to study and understand user interaction with the interface and thus examine the positive aspects as well as the communicability problems found with the JECRIPE game -a game developed specially for children with Down syndrome in pre-scholar age.