Presentations of virtual cultural heritage artifacts are often communicated via the medium of interactive digital storytelling. The synergy of a storied narrative embedded within a 3D virtual reconstruction context has high consumer appeal and edutainment value. We investigate if 360° videos presented through virtual reality further contribute to user immersion for the application of preserving intangible cultural heritage. A case study then analyzes whether conventional desktop media is significantly different from virtual reality as a medium for immersion in intangible heritage contexts. The case study describes bridge diving at Stari Most, the old bridge in Mostar Bosnia. This application aims to present and preserve the bridge diving tradition at this site. The project describes the site and history along with cultural connections, and a series of quiz questions are presented after viewing all of the materials. Successful completion of the quiz allows a user to participate in a virtual bridge dive. The subjective evaluation provided evidence to suggest that our method is successful in preserving intangible heritage and communicating ideas in key areas of concern for this heritage that can be used to develop a preservation framework in the future. It was also possible to conclude that experience within the virtual reality framework did not affect effort expectancy for the web application, but the same experience significantly influenced the performance expectancy construct.
In order to be used for skill development and skill maintenance, virtual environments require accurate simulation of the physical phenomena involved in the process of the task being trained. The accuracy needs to be conveyed in a multimodal fashion with varying parameterisations still being quantified, and these are a function of task, prior knowledge, sensory efficacy and human perception. Virtual reality (VR) has been integrated from a didactic perspective in many serious games and shown to be effective in the pedological process. This paper interrogates whether didactic processes introduced into a VR serious game, by taking advantage of augmented virtuality to modify game attributes, can be effective for both beginners and experts to a task. The task in question is subjective performance in a clay pigeon shooting simulation. The investigation covers whether modified game attributes influence skill and learning in a complex motor task and also investigates whether this process is applicable to experts as well as beginners to the task. VR offers designers and developers of serious games the ability to provide information in the virtual world in a fashion that is impossible in the real world. This introduces the question of whether this is effective and transfers skill adoption into the real world and also if a-priori knowledge influences the practical nature of this information in the pedagogic process. Analysis is conducted via a between-subjects repeated measure ANOVA using a 2 × 2 factorial design to address these questions. The results show that the different training provided affects the performance in this task (N = 57). The skill improvement is still evidenced in repeated measures when information and guidance is removed. This effect does not exist under a control condition. Additionally, we separate by an expert and non-expert group to deduce if a-priori knowledge influences the effect of the presented information, it is shown that it does not.
High dynamic range (HDR) imaging has become one of the foremost imaging methods capable of capturing and displaying the full range of lighting perceived by the human visual system in the real world. A number of HDR compression methods for both images and video have been developed to handle HDR data, but none of them has yet been adopted as the method of choice. In particular the backwards-compatible methods that always maintain a stream/image that allow part of the content to be viewed on conventional displays make use of tone mapping operators which were developed to view HDR images on traditional displays. There are a large number of tone mappers, none of which is considered the best as the images produced could be deemed subjective. This work presents an alternative to tone mapping based HDR content compression by identifying a single exposure that can reproduce the most information from the original HDR image. This single exposure can be adapted to fit within the bit depth of any traditional encoder. Any additional information that may be lost is stored as a residual. Results demonstrate quality is maintained as well, and better, than other traditional methods. Furthermore, the presented method is backwards-compatible, straightforward to implement, fast and does not require choosing tone mappers or settings.
Psychotic disorders carry social and economic costs for sufferers and society. Recent evidence highlights the risk posed by urban upbringing and social deprivation in the genesis of paranoia and psychosis. Evidence based psychological interventions are often not offered because of a lack of therapists. Virtual reality (VR) environments have been used to treat mental health problems. VR may be a way of understanding the aetiological processes in psychosis and increasing psychotherapeutic resources for its treatment. We developed a high-fidelity virtual reality scenario of an urban street scene to test the hypothesis that virtual urban exposure is able to generate paranoia to a comparable or greater extent than scenarios using indoor scenes. Participants (n = 32) entered the VR scenario for four minutes, after which time their degree of paranoid ideation was assessed. We demonstrated that the virtual reality scenario was able to elicit paranoia in a nonclinical, healthy group and that an urban scene was more likely to lead to higher levels of paranoia than a virtual indoor environment. We suggest that this study offers evidence to support the role of exposure to factors in the urban environment in the genesis and maintenance of psychotic experiences and symptoms. The realistic high-fidelity street scene scenario may offer a useful tool for therapists.
A number of novel imaging technologies have been gaining popularity over the past few years. Foremost among these are stereoscopy and high dynamic range (HDR) Imaging. While a large body of research has looked into each of these imaging technologies independently, very little work has attempted to combine them. This is mostly due to the current limitations in capture and display. In this article, we mitigate problems of capturing Stereoscopic HDR (SHDR) that would potentially require two HDR cameras, by capturing an HDR and LDR pair and using it to generate 3D stereoscopic HDR content. We ran a detailed user study to compare four different methods of generating SHDR content. The methods investigated were the following: two based on expanding the luminance of the LDR image, and two utilizing stereo correspondence methods, which were adapted for our purposes. Results demonstrate that one of the stereo correspondence methods may be considered perceptually indistinguishable from the ground truth (image pair captured using two HDR cameras), while the other methods are all significantly distinct from the ground truth.
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