Virtual reality (VR) has evolved substantially beyond its initial remit of gaming and entertainment, catalyzed by advancements such as improved screen resolutions and more accessible devices. Among various interaction techniques introduced to VR, eye-tracking stands out as a pivotal development. It not only augments immersion but offers a nuanced insight into user behavior and attention. This precision in capturing gaze direction has made eye-tracking instrumental for applications far beyond mere interaction, influencing areas like medical diagnostics, neuroscientific research, educational interventions, and architectural design, to name a few. Though eye-tracking’s integration into VR has been acknowledged in prior reviews, its true depth, spanning the intricacies of its deployment to its broader ramifications across diverse sectors, has been sparsely explored. This survey undertakes that endeavor, offering a comprehensive overview of eye-tracking’s state of the art within the VR landscape. We delve into its technological nuances, its pivotal role in modern VR applications, and its transformative impact on domains ranging from medicine and neuroscience to marketing and education. Through this exploration, we aim to present a cohesive understanding of the current capabilities, challenges, and future potential of eye-tracking in VR, underscoring its significance and the novelty of our contribution.

Volume rendering has been a relevant topic in scientific visualization for the last decades. However, the exploration of reasonably big volume datasets requires considerable computing power, which has limited this field to the desktop scenario. But the recent advances in mobile graphics hardware have motivated the research community to overcome these restrictions and to bring volume graphics to these ubiquitous handheld platforms. This survey presents the past and present work on mobile volume rendering, and is meant to serve as an overview and introduction to the field. It proposes a classification of the current efforts and covers aspects such as advantages and issues of the mobile platforms, rendering strategies, performance and user interfaces. The paper ends by highlighting promising research directions to motivate the development of new and interesting mobile volume solutions.

Purpose: Virtual reality has been used as a training platform in medicine, allowing the repetition of a situation/scenario as many times as needed and making it patient-specific prior to an operation. Of special interest is the minimally invasive plate osteosynthesis (MIPO). It represents a novel technique for orthopedic trauma surgery, but requires intensive training to acquire the required skills. In this paper, we propose a virtual reality platform for training the surgical reduction of supracondylar fractures of the humerus using MIPO. The system presents a detailed surgical theater where the surgeon has to place the bone fragments properly. Methods: Seven experienced users were selected to perform a surgical reduction using our proposal. Two paired humeri were scanned from a dataset obtained from the Complejo Hospitalario de Jaén. A virtual fracture was performed in one side of the pair, using the other as contralateral part. Users have to simulate a reduction for each case and fill out a survey about usability, using a five-option Likert scale. Results: The subjects have obtained excellent scores in both simulations. The users have notably reduced the time employed in the second experiment, being 60% less in average. Subjects have valued the usability (5.0), the intuitiveness (4.6), comfort (4.5), and realism (4.9) in a 1–5 Likert scale. The mean score of the usability survey was 4.66. Conclusion: The system has shown a high learning rate, and it is expected that the trainees will reach an expert level after additional runs. By focusing on the movement of bone fragments, specialists acquire motor skills to avoid the malrotation of MIPO-treated fractures. A future study can fulfill the requirements needed to include this training system into the protocol of real surgeries. Therefore, we expect the system to increase the confidence of the trainees as well as to improve their decision making.