The purpose of this research is the creation of the framework for immersive Virtual Worlds (VW) development and evaluation of factors affecting user’s immersion experience in 3D virtual worlds. Three experiments have been conducted to evaluate different aspects of the immersion experience in virtual reality. The first experiment aimed to explore the influence of communication on users whilst performing certain activities in a virtual world. The second experiment evaluated how the real-world environment affects users in a virtual world. The third experiment examined the aspect of mobility as a main contributor to a user’s distraction. The fourth experiment partly confirmed previous findings and added new factors, affecting immersion experience. The results of all experiments formed a framework, containing factors which users considered as affecting them during their activities in virtual worlds. During the experimentation phase of this research a combination of qualitative and quantitative methods was used. The Grounded Theory (GT) methodology was applied for data analysis in qualitative part. The major contribution of this research is the framework of factors for building immersive 3D virtual environments. Another contribution is the evaluation of factors affecting users in such an environment.

This thesis explores a way of increasing the perception of reality within an ''Augmented Reality'' application by making real objects able to obstruct the view of virtual objects. This mimics how real opaque objects occlude each other and thus making virtual objects behave the same way will improve the user experience of Augmented Reality users. The solution uses Unity as the engine with plugins for ARKit and OpenCV. ARKit provides the Augmented Reality experience and can detect real world flat surfaces on which virtual objects can be placed. OpenCV is used for image processing to detect real world objects which can then be translated into virtual silhouettes within Unity that can interact with, and occlude, the virtual objects. The end result is a system that can handle the occlusion in real time, while allowing both the real and virtual objects to translate and rotate within the scene while still maintaining the occlusion. The big drawback of the solution is that it requires a well defined environment without visual clutter and with even lighting to work as intended. This makes it unsuitable for outdoor usage.

Alternate Reality Games (ARG) have been one of the first and most prominent viral marketing tools. In a dynamic marketing world, where new practices appear every other day and seemingly ‘old’ practices lose their appeal very quickly, Blizzard Entertainment – a leading video game developer – gained much attention regarding its marketing strategy promoting the release of a new playable hero called ‘Sombra’ for their online game Overwatch, which is the third most-played game in the world with over 20 million unique users. For the campaign, the publisher used in-game hints as well as short clips with further hints (such as ASCII algorithms and hidden QR codes), which had to be decrypted by the users. This virtual scavenger hunt even included seemingly real websites of fictional companies with telephone numbers that could be called leading to further hints. In this paper we take a closer look at this particular campaign that has been praised internationally for its marketing both pre- and post-release. However, parts of the Overwatch community have complained on various online platforms about numerous aspects of the ARG experience. The paper serves two main purposes. Firstly, we explore the ARG participants’ experiences in terms of their customer satisfaction. Secondly, from a theoretical viewpoint, we investigate the applicability of the expectancy disconfirmation theory in this particular case. Thus, this paper may assist future ARG developers in creating engaging content by providing insights concerning the satisfaction of its participants. [... from the introduction]

The emerging global middle class, which is expected to double by 2050 desires more walkable, liveable neighbourhoods, and as distances between work and other amenities increases, cities are becoming less monocentric and becoming more polycentric. African cities could be described as walking cities, based on the number of people that walk to their destinations as opposed to other means of mobility but are often not walkable. Walking is by far the most popular form of transportation in Africa’s rapidly urbanising cities, although it is not often by choice rather a necessity. Facilitating this primary mode, while curbing the growth of less sustainable mobility uses requires special attention for the safety and convenience of walking in view of a Global South context. In this regard, to further promote walking as a sustainable mobility option, there is a need to assess the current state of its supporting infrastructure and begin giving it higher priority, focus and emphasis. Mobile phones have emerged as a useful alternative tool to collect this data and audit the state of walkability in cities. They eliminate the inaccuracies and inefficiencies of human memories because smartphone sensors such as GPS provides information with accuracies within 5m, providing superior accuracy and precision compared to other traditional methods. The data is also spatial in nature, allowing for a range of possible applications and use cases. Traditional inventory approaches in walkability often only revealed the perceived walkability and accessibility for only a subset of journeys. Crowdsourcing the perceived walkability and accessibility of points of interest in African cities could address this, albeit aspects such as ease-of-use and road safety should also be considered. A tool that crowdsources individual pedestrian experiences; availability and state of pedestrian infrastructure and amenities, using state-of-the-art smartphone technology, would over time also result in complete surveys of the walking environment provided such a tool is popular and safe. This research will illustrate how mobile phone applications currently in the market can be improved to offer more functionality that factors in multiple sensory modalities for enhanced visual appeal, ease of use, and aesthetics. The overarching aim of this research is, therefore, to develop the framework for and test a pilot-version mobile phone-based data collection tool that incorporates emerging technologies in collecting data on walkability. This research project will assess the effectiveness of the mobile application and test the technical capabilities of the system to experience how it operates within an existing infrastructure. It will continue to investigate the use of mobile phone technology in the collection of user perceptions of walkability, and the limitations of current transportation-based mobile applications, with the aim of developing an application that is an improvement to current offerings in the market. The prototype application will be tested and later piloted in different locations around the globe. Past studies are primarily focused on the development of transport-based mobile phone applications with basic features and limited functionality. Although limited progress has been made in integrating emerging advanced technologies such as Augmented Reality (AR), Machine Learning (ML), Big Data analytics, amongst others into mobile phone applications; what is missing from these past examples is a comprehensive and structured application in the transportation sphere. In turn, the full research will offer a broader understanding of the iii information gathered from these smart devices, and how that large volume of varied data can be better and more quickly interpreted to discover trends, patterns, and aid in decision making and planning. This research project attempts to fill this gap and also bring new insights, thus promote the research field of transportation data collection audits, with particular emphasis on walkability audits. In this regard, this research seeks to provide insights into how such a tool could be applied in assessing and promoting walkability as a sustainable and equitable mobility option. In order to get policy-makers, analysts, and practitioners in urban transport planning and provision in cities to pay closer attention to making better, more walkable places, appealing to them from an efficiency and business perspective is vital. This crowdsourced data is of great interest to industry practitioners, local governments and research communities as Big Data, and to urban communities and civil society as an input in their advocacy activities. The general findings from the results of this research show clear evidence that transport-based mobile phone applications currently available in the market are increasingly getting outdated and are not keeping up with new and emerging technologies and innovations. It is also evident from the results that mobile smartphones have revolutionised the collection of transport-related information hence the need for new initiatives to help take advantage of this emerging opportunity. The implications of these findings are that more attention needs to be paid to this niche going forward. This research project recommends that more studies, particularly on what technologies and functionalities can realistically be incorporated into mobile phone applications in the near future be done as well as on improving the hardware specifications of mobile phone devices to facilitate and support these emerging technologies whilst keeping the cost of mobile devices as low as possible.

<p>Emerging technologies in the classroom are paving the way towards high-quality, hands-on distance learning. Augmented Reality (AR), which overlays virtual information into the physical world, provides a promising solution for the development and delivery of collaborative educational content. Frameworks such as ARkit, ARCore, have enabled AR experiences to become available to a wider audience. However, there are still several challenges to implementing an AR-based curriculum in classrooms, such as difficulty to create AR content, lack of an architecture capable of supporting collaboration between users, and questions about the user experience. This thesis introduces the MetaAR project, a series of solutions to enable instructors and designers to prototype AR experiences in collaborative and distant classrooms. We designed and tested interactive systems, each targeted towards solving a different problem: (1) MetaAR, an augmented reality authoring platform for instructors and students; (2) RobotAR, a robotics toolkit to create augmented reality-based makerspaces; (3) ColabAR, a toolkit for quick-prototyping of Tangible Augmented Reality (TAR) laboratories; (4) Grove-Blockly, a website with a STEAM curriculum involving IoTs, crafting and coding aimed at middle-schoolers; (5) Towards Modeling of Human Skilling for Electrical</p> <p>Circuitry using Augmented Reality Applications, which provides a model to cluster microskills found in AR (perceptual, cognitive, motor) and aligns them to educational content design for AR. Our preliminary results, obtained from user studies involving more than 120 participants, provide evidence of the sustainability and the positive reception of our prototypes in learning environments. We demonstrated an improvement in several of students’ key competencies and in the overall user experience for both instructors and students. Our hope is that this thesis provides a pathway towards more natural interactions and advances in our understanding of distance learning technology, which is becoming increasingly important in today's society.</p>

VR is a relatively new technology that has been shown to have potential to increase productivity andfacilitate better decision making, both within the architecture role and in the broader building industry. However, there are many difficulties that stand in the way of this new technology. In this study, the researcher uses semi-structured interviews to interview six working architects from threecities in Sweden. This is an attempt to investigate what architects think are the technical difficultiesthat stand in the way of VR use within the architect role. Both software and hardware limitations are investigated. I additionally investigate what architects think are potential solutions to those problems, and how architects think VR can be used in the future in a way that would be useful and facilitate better communication. This study found that, according to the architects interviewed, the technical limitations are mainly the lack of portability, isolation from the outside world, the need for powerful hardware, motion sickness, movement restrictions and the setup process being generally inconvenient. The future use of VR that would be useful according to the architects interviewed are the ability to have virtual meetings, VR being used in conjunction with AR, the ability to design and sketch in VR and using VR as a communication tool to convey design ideas to the public.

abstract: Evidence suggests that Augmented Reality (AR) may be a powerful tool for alleviating certain, lightly held scientific misconceptions. However, many misconceptions surrounding the theory of evolution are deeply held and resistant to change. This study examines whether AR can serve as an effective tool for alleviating these misconceptions by comparing the change in the number of misconceptions expressed by users of a tablet-based version of a well-established classroom simulation to the change in the number of misconceptions expressed by users of AR versions of the simulation. The use of realistic representations of objects is common for many AR developers. However, this contradicts well-tested practices of multimedia design that argue against the addition of unnecessary elements. This study also compared the use of representational visualizations in AR, in this case, models of ladybug beetles, to symbolic representations, in this case, colored circles. To address both research questions, a one-factor, between-subjects experiment was conducted with 189 participants randomly assigned to one of three conditions: non AR, symbolic AR, and representational AR. Measures of change in the number and types of misconceptions expressed, motivation, and time on task were examined using a pair of planned orthogonal contrasts designed to test the study’s two research questions. Participants in the AR-based condition showed a significantly smaller change in the number of total misconceptions expressed after the treatment as well as in the number of misconceptions related to intentionality; none of the other misconceptions examined showed a significant difference. No significant differences were found in the total number of misconceptions expressed between participants in the representative and symbolic AR-based conditions, or on motivation. Contrary to the expectation that the simulation would alleviate misconceptions, the average change in the number of misconceptions expressed by participants increased. This is theorized to be due to the juxtaposition of virtual and real-world entities resulting in a reduction in assumed intentionality. / Dissertation/Thesis / Doctoral Dissertation Educational Technology 2019

The subjective experience of presence is considered to be important in the treatment of anxiety disorders using virtual reality. Presence can be defined as a psychological phenomenon through which one's cognitive processes are oriented towards another world. Most of the research on presence has focused on the roles of technological factors influencing presence, while the number of studies focusing on the personality and physiological predictors are far fewer. Thus, the present study examined the relationship between various personality variables and presence, along with physiological correlates of presence when engaged in a virtual environment. The Presence Questionnaire, to determine their experience of presence, and a small battery of personality-related questionnaires were administered to 70 young adults who participated in 3 different virtual reality scenarios. Participants' physiological responses were recorded in the form of heart rate, galvanic skin levels, and galvanic skin responses were assessed as were urges to drink (craving). Data analysis showed that expectations, levels of craving, and drinking history played a significant role in the experience of presence.

The Army needs a distributed training environment that can be accessed whenever and wherever required for training and mission rehearsal. This paper describes an exploratory experiment designed to investigate the effectiveness of a prototype of such a system in training a navigation task. A wearable computer, acoustic tracking system, and see-through head mounted display (HMD) were used to wirelessly track users' head position and orientation while presenting a graphic representation of their virtual surroundings, through which the user walked using natural movement. As previous studies have shown that virtual environments can be used to train navigation, the ability to add natural movement to a type of virtual environment may enhance that training, based on the proprioceptive feedback gained by walking through the environment. Sixty participants were randomly assigned to one of three conditions: route drawing on printed floor plan, rehearsal in the actual facility, and rehearsal in a mixed reality (MR) environment. Participants, divided equally between male and female in each group, studied verbal directions of route, then performed three rehearsals of the route, with those in the map condition drawing it onto three separate printed floor plans, those in the practice condition walking through the actual facility, and participants in the MR condition walking through a three dimensional virtual environment, with landmarks, waypoints and virtual footprints. A scaling factor was used, with each step in the MR environment equal to three steps in the real environment, with the MR environment also broken into "tiles", like pages in an atlas, through which participant progressed, entering each tile in succession until they completed the entire route. Transfer of training testing that consisted of a timed traversal of the route through the actual facility showed a significant difference in route knowledge based on the total time to complete the route, and the number of errors committed while doing so, with "walkers" performing better than participants in the paper map or MR condition, although the effect was weak. Survey knowledge showed little difference among the three rehearsal conditions. Three standardized tests of spatial abilities did not correlate with route traversal time, or errors, or with 3 of the 4 orientation localization tasks. Within the MR rehearsal condition there was a clear performance improvement over the three rehearsal trials as measured by the time required to complete the route in the MR environment which was accepted as an indication that learning occurred. As measured using the Simulator Sickness Questionnaire, there were no incidents of simulator sickness in the MR environment. Rehearsal in the actual facility was the most effective training condition; however, it is often not an acceptable form of rehearsal given an inaccessible or hostile environment. Performance between participants in the other two conditions were indistinguishable, pointing toward continued experimentation that should include the combined effect of paper map rehearsal with mixed reality, especially as it is likely to be the more realistic case for mission rehearsal, since there is no indication that maps should be eliminated. To walk through the environment beforehand can enhance the Soldiers' understanding of their surroundings, as was evident through the comments from participants as they moved from MR to the actual space: "This looks like I was just here", and "There's that pole I kept having trouble with". Such comments lead one to believe that this is a tool to continue to explore and apply. While additional research on the scaling and tiling factors is likely warranted, to determine if the effect can be applied to other environments or tasks, it should be pointed out that this is not a new task for most adults who have interacted with maps, where a scaling factor of 1 to 15,000 is common in orienteering maps, and 1 to 25,000 in military maps. Rehearsal time spent in the MR condition varied widely, some of which could be blamed on an issue referred to as "avatar excursions", a system anomaly that should be addressed in future research. The proprioceptive feedback in MR was expected to positively impact performance scores. It is very likely that proprioceptive feedback is what led to the lack of simulator sickness among these participants. The design of the HMD may have aided in the minimal reported symptoms as it allowed participants some peripheral vision that provided orientation cues as to their body position and movement. Future research might include a direct comparison between this MR, and a virtual environment system through which users move by manipulating an input device such as a mouse or joystick, while physically remaining stationary. The exploration and confirmation of the training capabilities of MR as is an important step in the development and application of the system to the U.S. Army training mission. This experiment was designed to examine one potential training area in a small controlled environment, which can be used as the foundation for experimentation with more complex tasks such as wayfinding through an urban environment, and or in direct comparison to more established virtual environments to determine strengths, as well as areas for improvement, to make MR as an effective addition to the Army training mission.

This study investigated the development of trust between strangers interacting via avatars in virtual worlds. The first part of the study analyzed perceived trustworthiness based on the visual appearance of avatars; the second part makes observations of two strangers self-disclosing information via avatars in a virtual world; the third part analyzed an experimental situation of two individuals interacting via avatars, where avatar appearance was changed and participants were recruited based on their experience with interacting with others via avatars. Findings showed that perceived trustworthiness does vary based on the visual appearance of the avatar. A positive relationship was found for self-disclosure and experience, in that those who have previously chosen to participate in a virtual world were more likely to share more detailed information about themselves. Non-significant differences in self-disclosure were found for avatar appearance; however, experience in using virtual worlds was significantly different for the willingness to share information before engaging in a task: experienced participants shared more information than inexperienced participants. This suggests that self-disclosure might be influenced by appearance at the point of formation in that the experienced are willing to overlook the avatar, and less so when there are other sources of information to base trust-behavior on (Altman & Taylor, 1973; Nowak & Rauh, 2006). Recommendations were made for modifications for similar experiments trying to validate an objective measure of trust, and for continued research in the development of trust between strangers interacting via avatars.