Modulating emotional responses to virtual stimuli is a fundamental goal of many immersive interac... more Modulating emotional responses to virtual stimuli is a fundamental goal of many immersive interactive applications. In this study, we leverage the illusion of illusory embodiment and show that owning a virtual body provides means to modulate emotional responses. In a single-factor repeated-measures experiment, we manipulated the degree of illusory embodiment and assessed the emotional responses to virtual stimuli. We presented emotional stimuli in the same environment as the virtual body. Participants experienced higher arousal, dominance, and more intense valence in the high embodiment condition compared to the low embodiment condition. The illusion of embodiment thus intensifies the emotional processing of the virtual environment. This result suggests that artificial bodies can increase the effectiveness of immersive applications psychotherapy, entertainment, computer-mediated social interactions, or health applications.
Background The rehabilitation of gait disorders in patients with multiple sclerosis (MS) and stro... more Background The rehabilitation of gait disorders in patients with multiple sclerosis (MS) and stroke is often based on conventional treadmill training. Virtual reality (VR)-based treadmill training can increase motivation and improve therapy outcomes. The present study evaluated an immersive virtual reality application (using a head-mounted display, HMD) for gait rehabilitation with patients to (1) demonstrate its feasibility and acceptance and to (2) compare its short-term effects to a semi-immersive presentation (using a monitor) and a conventional treadmill training without VR to assess the usability of both systems and estimate the effects on walking speed and motivation. Methods In a within-subjects study design, 36 healthy participants and 14 persons with MS or stroke participated in each of the three experimental conditions (VR via HMD, VR via monitor, treadmill training without VR). Results For both groups, the walking speed in the HMD condition was higher than in treadmill t...
IEEE Transactions on Visualization and Computer Graphics
Modularity, modifiability, reusability, and API usability are important software qualities that d... more Modularity, modifiability, reusability, and API usability are important software qualities that determine the maintainability of software architectures. Virtual, Augmented, and Mixed Reality (VR, AR, MR) systems, modern computer games, as well as interactive human-robot systems often include various dedicated input-, output-, and processing subsystems. These subsystems collectively maintain a real-time simulation of a coherent application state. The resulting interdependencies between individual state representations, mutual state access, overall synchronization, and flow of control implies a conceptual close coupling whereas software quality asks for a decoupling to develop maintainable solutions. This article presents five semantics-based software techniques that address this contradiction: Semantic grounding, code from semantics, grounded actions, semantic queries, and decoupling by semantics. These techniques are applied to extend the well-established entity-component-system (ECS) pattern to overcome some of this pattern's deficits with respect to the implied state access. A walk-through of central implementation aspects of a multimodal (speech and gesture) VR-interface is used to highlight the techniques' benefits. This use-case is chosen as a prototypical example of complex architectures with multiple interacting subsystems found in many VR, AR and MR architectures. Finally, implementation hints are given, lessons learned regarding maintainability pointed-out, and performance implications discussed.
The mediation of social presence is one of the most interesting challenges of modern communicatio... more The mediation of social presence is one of the most interesting challenges of modern communication technology. The proposed metaphor of Interactive Social Displays describes new ways of interactions with multi-/crossmodal interfaces prepared for a psychologically augmented communication. A first prototype demonstrates the application of this metaphor in a teleconferencing scenario. Index Terms—conferencing, collaborative work, social presence, social interaction.
This paper introduces semantic reflection, a novel concept for a modular design of intelligent ap... more This paper introduces semantic reflection, a novel concept for a modular design of intelligent applications. SCIVE, a simulation core for intelligent Virtual Environments (IVEs), provides semantic reflection on mul- tiple layers: SCIVE's architecture grants semantic driven uniform access to low-level simulation core logic, to specific simulation modules' application definitions, as well as to high-level semantic environment de- scriptions. It additionally
Modulating emotional responses to virtual stimuli is a fundamental goal of many immersive interac... more Modulating emotional responses to virtual stimuli is a fundamental goal of many immersive interactive applications. In this study, we leverage the illusion of illusory embodiment and show that owning a virtual body provides means to modulate emotional responses. In a single-factor repeated-measures experiment, we manipulated the degree of illusory embodiment and assessed the emotional responses to virtual stimuli. We presented emotional stimuli in the same environment as the virtual body. Participants experienced higher arousal, dominance, and more intense valence in the high embodiment condition compared to the low embodiment condition. The illusion of embodiment thus intensifies the emotional processing of the virtual environment. This result suggests that artificial bodies can increase the effectiveness of immersive applications psychotherapy, entertainment, computer-mediated social interactions, or health applications.
Background The rehabilitation of gait disorders in patients with multiple sclerosis (MS) and stro... more Background The rehabilitation of gait disorders in patients with multiple sclerosis (MS) and stroke is often based on conventional treadmill training. Virtual reality (VR)-based treadmill training can increase motivation and improve therapy outcomes. The present study evaluated an immersive virtual reality application (using a head-mounted display, HMD) for gait rehabilitation with patients to (1) demonstrate its feasibility and acceptance and to (2) compare its short-term effects to a semi-immersive presentation (using a monitor) and a conventional treadmill training without VR to assess the usability of both systems and estimate the effects on walking speed and motivation. Methods In a within-subjects study design, 36 healthy participants and 14 persons with MS or stroke participated in each of the three experimental conditions (VR via HMD, VR via monitor, treadmill training without VR). Results For both groups, the walking speed in the HMD condition was higher than in treadmill t...
IEEE Transactions on Visualization and Computer Graphics
Modularity, modifiability, reusability, and API usability are important software qualities that d... more Modularity, modifiability, reusability, and API usability are important software qualities that determine the maintainability of software architectures. Virtual, Augmented, and Mixed Reality (VR, AR, MR) systems, modern computer games, as well as interactive human-robot systems often include various dedicated input-, output-, and processing subsystems. These subsystems collectively maintain a real-time simulation of a coherent application state. The resulting interdependencies between individual state representations, mutual state access, overall synchronization, and flow of control implies a conceptual close coupling whereas software quality asks for a decoupling to develop maintainable solutions. This article presents five semantics-based software techniques that address this contradiction: Semantic grounding, code from semantics, grounded actions, semantic queries, and decoupling by semantics. These techniques are applied to extend the well-established entity-component-system (ECS) pattern to overcome some of this pattern's deficits with respect to the implied state access. A walk-through of central implementation aspects of a multimodal (speech and gesture) VR-interface is used to highlight the techniques' benefits. This use-case is chosen as a prototypical example of complex architectures with multiple interacting subsystems found in many VR, AR and MR architectures. Finally, implementation hints are given, lessons learned regarding maintainability pointed-out, and performance implications discussed.
The mediation of social presence is one of the most interesting challenges of modern communicatio... more The mediation of social presence is one of the most interesting challenges of modern communication technology. The proposed metaphor of Interactive Social Displays describes new ways of interactions with multi-/crossmodal interfaces prepared for a psychologically augmented communication. A first prototype demonstrates the application of this metaphor in a teleconferencing scenario. Index Terms—conferencing, collaborative work, social presence, social interaction.
This paper introduces semantic reflection, a novel concept for a modular design of intelligent ap... more This paper introduces semantic reflection, a novel concept for a modular design of intelligent applications. SCIVE, a simulation core for intelligent Virtual Environments (IVEs), provides semantic reflection on mul- tiple layers: SCIVE's architecture grants semantic driven uniform access to low-level simulation core logic, to specific simulation modules' application definitions, as well as to high-level semantic environment de- scriptions. It additionally
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Papers by Marc Erich Latoschik