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Hands are the most important tool to interact with virtual environments, and they should be available to perform the most critical tasks. For example, a surgeon in VR should keep his/her hands on the instruments and be able to do secondary tasks without performing a disruptive event to the operative task. In this common scenario, one can observe that hands are not available for interaction. The goal of this systematic review is to survey the literature and identify which hands-free interfaces are used, the performed interaction tasks, what metrics are used for interface evaluation, and the results of such evaluations. From 80 studies that met the eligibility criteria, the voice is the most studied interface, followed by the eye and head gaze. Some novel interfaces were brain interfaces and face expressions. System control and selection represent most of the interaction tasks studied and most studies evaluate interfaces for usability. Despite the best interface depending on the task and study, the voice was found to be versatile and showed good results amongst the studies. More research is recommended to improve the practical use of the interfaces and to evaluate the interfaces more formally.

The adoption of immersive virtual experiences (IVEs) opened new research lines where the impact of realism is being studied, allowing developers to focus resources on realism factors proven to improve the user experience the most. We analysed papers that compared different levels of realism and evaluated their impact on user experience. Exploratorily, we also synthesised the realism terms used by authors. From 1300 initial documents, 79 met the eligibility criteria. Overall, most of the studies reported that higher realism has a positive impact on user experience. These data allow a better understanding of realism in IVEs, guiding future R&D.

Multiple factors can affect presence in virtual environments, such as the number of human senses engaged in a given experience or the extent to which the virtual experience is credible. The purpose of the present work is to study how the inclusion of credible multisensory stimuli affects the sense of presence, namely, through the use of wind, passive haptics, vibration, and scent. Our sample consisted of 37 participants (27 men and 10 women) whose ages ranged from 17 to 44 years old and were mostly students. The participants were divided randomly into 3 groups: Control Scenario (visual and auditory -N = 12), Passive Haptic Scenario (visual, auditory, and passive haptic -N = 13) and Multisensory Scenario (visual, auditory, wind, passive haptic, vibration, and scent -N = 12). The results indicated a significant increase in the involvement subscale when all multisensory stimuli were delivered. We found a trend where the use of passive haptics by itself has a positive impact on presence, which should be the subject of further work.

Virtual reality (VR) games have the potential to produce immersive experiences. To better explore the potential of VR games, it becomes necessary to understand what affects the player's presence in VR games. This work measures and compares the levels of presence and cybersickness in VR environments. Two games with different levels of interaction and narrative were compared. Presence and cybersickness were measured in a sample of 32 subjects using the IPQp questionnaire and a Portuguese version of the SSQ respectively.The results indicate that there were no differences in presence and cybersickness between the interaction and the narrative dimensions. To extend the study, the gender of participants was also considered an independent variable where we found significant differences in the metrics of presence and experienced realism, nausea and disorientation with female participants getting higher scores.

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