With the development of metaverse(s), industry and academia are searching for the best ways to represent users' avatars in shared virtual environments (VEs), where real‐time communication between users is required. The expressiveness of avatars is crucial for transmitting emotions that are key for social presence and user experience, and are conveyed via verbal and non‐verbal facial and body signals. In this paper, two real‐time modalities for conveying expressions in virtual reality (VR) via realistic, full‐body avatars are compared by means of a user study. The first modality uses dedicated hardware (i.e., eye and facial trackers) to allow a mapping between the user's facial expressions/eye movements and the avatar model. The second modality relies on an algorithm that, starting from an audio clip, approximates the facial motion by generating plausible lip and eye movements. The participants were requested to observe, for both the modalities, the avatar of an actor performing six scenes involving as many basic emotions. The evaluation considered mainly social presence and emotion conveyance. Results showed a clear superiority of facial tracking when compared to lip sync in conveying sadness and disgust. The same was less evident for happiness and fear. No differences were observed for anger and surprise.

A common operation performed in Virtual Reality (VR) environments is locomotion. Although real walking can represent a natural and intuitive way to manage displacements in such environments, its use is generally limited by the size of the area tracked by the VR system (typically, the size of a room) or requires expensive technologies to cover particularly extended settings. A number of approaches have been proposed to enable effective explorations in VR, each characterized by different hardware requirements and costs, and capable to provide different levels of usability and performance. However, the lack of a well-defined methodology for assessing and comparing available approaches makes it difficult to identify, among the various alternatives, the best solutions for selected application domains. To deal with this issue, this article introduces a novel evaluation testbed which, by building on the outcomes of many separate works reported in the literature, aims to support a comprehensive analysis of the considered design space. An experimental protocol for collecting objective and subjective measures is proposed, together with a scoring system able to rank locomotion approaches based on a weighted set of requirements. Testbed usage is illustrated in a use case requesting to select the technique to adopt in a given application scenario.

One key aspect for the safety and success of first responders’ operations is the compliance, during the intervention, with all the safety procedures and prescribed behaviors. Although real-world simulation exercises are considered as the best way to verify if operators are ready to handle emergency situations, they are not always a viable approach. Firefighting courses, for example, do not usually include this kind of activities, due to the numerous hazards related to deploying controlled fires for the simulation. However, traditional training approaches based on class lessons and multimedia learning material may not be particularly effective for teaching practical skills and procedural behaviors. In this work, the use of a Virtual Reality Training Simulation (VRTS) combined with passive haptic interfaces and a real-time fire simulation logic is investigated as a complement to a traditional video-based training approach used in the context of forest firefighting. The teaching of safety concepts and correct use of individual firefighting tools was selected as a use case, and a user study involving 45 trainees was carried out in the context of an existing training course. One third of the trainees attended the traditional video-based lessons of the course, whereas the remaining ones also took part to a practice training session, half of them with the devised VRTS, the others in the real world. Experimental results showed that the additional use of the devised VRTS improved the trainees’ procedural learning, as well as their motivation and perceived quality of the overall learning experience.

Augmented reality (AR) has a number of applications in industry, but remote assistance represents one of the most prominent and widely studied use cases. Notwithstanding, although the set of functionalities supporting the communication between remote experts and on-site operators grew over time, the way in which remote assistance is delivered has not evolved yet to unleash the full potential of AR technology. The expert typically guides the operator step-by-step, and basically uses AR-based hints to visually support voice instructions. With this approach, skilled human resources may go under-utilized, as the time an expert invests in the assistance corresponds to the time needed by the operator to execute the requested operations. The goal of this work is to introduce a new approach to remote assistance that takes advantage of AR functionalities separately proposed in academic works and commercial products to re-organize the guidance workflow, with the aim to increase the operator’s autonomy and, thus, optimize the use of expert’s time. An AR-powered remote assistance platform able to support the devised approach is also presented. By means of a user study, this approach was compared to traditional step-by-step guidance, with the aim to estimate what is the potential of AR that is still unexploited. Results showed that with the new approach it is possible to reduce the time investment for the expert, allowing the operator to autonomously complete the assigned tasks in a time comparable to step-by-step guidance with a negligible need for further support.

The present research concerns the contextualisation and presentation of eleven small statues from the Tang era dated from the XI and XII centuries CE today housed at the Asian Art Museum in Turin (MAO). A multidisciplinary group with expertise in Asian art, digital representation, and information processing systems, with the support of VR@POLITO and MOD Lab Arch of the Politecnico di Torino is involved in the work. The goal is to present together several Tang-era pottery models not belonging to the same funerary outfit within the spaces of a coeval, philologically compatible hypogeal tomb. With a pronounced storytelling intent, the reconstructive 3D model represents a virtual exhibition project summarizing Tang art’s architectural, pictorial, and sculptural features. The pipeline was developed through photogrammetric acquisition with Structure from Motion (SfM) technology and 3D modeling of the artworks, reconstructive modeling and texturing of a Tang tomb as the ideal space of the statues, and communication through a virtual reality (VR) experience augmented with a set of information.