Visuospatial functions play a crucial role in human cognition, which has elicited over years a great deal of research focusing on their assessment, training and restoration. Interestingly, although our visuospatial capacities allow us to understand and infer relationships of 3D objects in space, these 3D aspects of visuospatial processing are profoundly neglected in laboratory tests, and instead, 2D designs are commonly used. Aiming to increase the ecological validity of such tests, we propose an experiment to evaluate the capacity of a 3D virtual space to stimulate cognitive functions. The experiment involves cognitive testing, EEG measurements, and cognitively stimulating tasks in an immersive 3D virtual environment rendered by a unique CAVE system. This paper focuses primarily on two game prototypes that will serve as the virtual environment and describes a natural movement control using the Myo armband, incorporated into one of the games. We also briefly discuss cognitive testing design using the selected brain electrophysiological variables measured on human subjects before and after the virtual reality game use, in order to assess the potential effect of the game.

COVID-19-related quarantine measures resulted in a significant increase of interest in online collaboration tools. This includes virtual reality (VR) or, in more general term, extended reality (XR) solutions. Shared XR allows for activities such as presentations, training of personnel or therapy to take place in a virtual space instead of a real one. To make online XR as accessible as possible, a significant effort has been put into the development of solutions that can run directly in web browsers. One of the most recognized solutions is the A-Frame software framework, created by Mozilla VR team and supporting most of the contemporary XR hardware. In addition, an extension called Networked-Aframe allows multiple users to share virtual environments, created using A-Frame, in real time. In this article, we introduce and experimentally evaluate three components that extend the functionality of A-Frame and Networked-Aframe. The first one extends Networked-Aframe with the ability to monitor and control users in a shared virtual scene. The second one implements six degrees of freedom motion tracking for smartphone-based VR headsets. The third one brings hand gesture support to the Microsoft HoloLens holographic computer. The evaluation was performed in a dedicated local network environment with 5, 10, 15 and 20 client computers. Each computer represented one user in a shared virtual scene. Since the experiments were carried out with and without the introduced components, the results presented here can also be regarded as a performance evaluation of A-Frame and Networked-Aframe themselves.

The paper presents LIRKIS CAVE, a Cave Automatic Virtual Environment, developed and built at the home institution of authors. The most significant features of LIRKIS CAVE are a compact and transportable design and use of LCD displays, organized in a decagon. The CAVE is described in terms of hardware and software and its performance is evaluated by a series of experiments. The paper also outlines future research and development activities related to the CAVE, which focus on the area of rehabilitation and education of handicapped people.

Information technologies impact our daily life in many significant ways. Nevertheless, there is a lack of availability of some technologies to the wide public caused by their location and price. This insufficiency seems to be even bigger for disabled people. LIRKIS laboratory of Technical university of Košice proposes solutions in education of these people and develops technologies of virtual reality which are capable to fulfill their needs. This paper is aimed at user interfaces (as VR technology) and the smart environment from human-centered perspective. The development process could become time consuming because in many cases the electrical network, sensory network and other physical elements need to be rebuilt to begin another test. Virtual reality technologies could solve this kind of issues low cost and fast. In this work a CAVE system was used in the comparison of standard approaches.