Virtual Reality Sickness Reduces Attention During Immersive Experiences.

In this paper, we show that Virtual Reality (VR) sickness is associated with a reduction in attention, which was detected with the P3b Event-Related Potential (ERP) component from electroencephalography (EEG) measurements collected in a dual-task paradigm. We hypothesized that sickness symptoms such as nausea, eyestrain, and fatigue would reduce the users' capacity to pay attention to tasks completed in a virtual environment, and that this reduction in attention would be dynamically reflected in a decrease of the P3b amplitude while VR sickness was experienced. In a user study, participants were taken on a tour through a museum in VR along paths with varying amounts of rotation, shown previously to cause different levels of VR sickness.

An enactivist-inspired mathematical model of cognition.

In this paper we start from the philosophical position in cognitive science known as enactivism. We formulate five basic enactivist tenets that we have carefully identified in the relevant literature as the main underlying principles of that philosophy. We then develop a mathematical framework to talk about cognitive systems (both artificial and natural) which complies with these enactivist tenets.

Augmenting Immersive Telepresence Experience with a Virtual Body.

We propose augmenting immersive telepresence by adding a virtual body, representing the user's own arm motions, as realized through a head-mounted display and a 360-degree camera. Previous research has shown the effectiveness of having a virtual body in simulated environments; however, research on whether seeing one's own virtual arms increases presence or preference for the user in an immersive telepresence setup is limited. We conducted a study where a host introduced a research lab while participants wore a head-mounted display which allowed them to be telepresent at the host's physical location via a 360-degree camera, either with or without a virtual body.

Can Simulated Nature Support Mental Health? Comparing Short, Single-Doses of 360-Degree Nature Videos in Virtual Reality With the Outdoors.

Nature exposure in virtual reality (VR) can provide emotional well-being benefits for people who cannot access the outdoors. Little is known about how these simulated experiences compare with real outdoor experiences. We conduct an experiment with healthy undergraduate students that tests the effects of 6 min of outdoor nature exposure with 6 min of exposure to a 360-degree VR nature video, which is recorded at the outdoor nature exposure location.

Generating Uniform Incremental Grids on SO(3) Using the Hopf Fibration.

The problem of generating uniform deterministic samples over the rotation group, SO(3), is fundamental to computational biology, chemistry, physics, and numerous branches of computer science. We present the best-known method to date for constructing incremental, deterministic grids on SO(3); it provides: 1) the lowest metric distortion for grid neighbor edges, 2) optimal dispersion-reduction with each additional sample, 3) explicit neighborhood structure, and 4) equivolumetric partition of SO(3) by the grid cells. We also demonstrate the use of the sequence on motion planning problems.