In the last decade, the use of virtual reality (VR) technologies has been increasing, as head-mounted display devices, such as the Meta Quest series, have become commercially accessible to everyday consumers. There are plenty of software applications developed for VR, ranging from games to serious training. Despite the fast-growing emergence of novel and natural gesture-based interface components, traditional windows, icons, menus, and pointer user interfaces still remain popular in these implementations. Therefore, navigating and interacting within 3-dimensional environments can still be challenging in virtual reality. This body of work will serve as a reference to the literature survey on 3-dimensional user interfaces and their implementations, and categorize them to reiterate a set of design recommendations for implementing 3-dimensional user interfaces in virtual reality. While questions revolve around the need for a 3-dimensional user interface if a 2-dimensional user interface suffices, we cannot ignore the capabilities and benefits offered when utilising 3-dimensional space. Unlike other work, this work proposes a novel metaphor-guided quadrant model to delineate the 3-dimensional user interface problem in an end-to-end manner. To achieve this, over 30 unique articles selected using a meta-analyses methodology were reviewed. The result highlights the dimensional semantics of the inputs and dimensional outcomes of the virtual targets. Notable reiterated design recommendations would match devices to interaction and then to the tasks in 3-dimensional environments, reducing the degrees of freedom, imposing constraints when possible, and not implementing one single best interaction technique. The results of this survey will be beneficial for virtual reality simulation designers or researchers attempting to determine the appropriate model when developing user interfaces for virtual reality content.

Navigating large-scale virtual spaces is a major challenge in Virtual Reality (VR) applications due to real-world spatial limitations. Walking-in-place (WIP) locomotion solutions may provide a natural approach for VR use cases that require locomotion to share similar qualities with walking in real-life. However, there is limited knowledge on the range of experiences across common WIP methods to inform the design of usable WIP solutions using consumer-accessible components. This paper contributes to this knowledge via a user study with 40 participants that experienced several easy-to-setup WIP methods in a VR commuting simulation. A nuanced understanding of cybersickness and exertion relationships and walking affordances based on different tracker setups were among the findings derived from a corroborated analysis of think-aloud, interview, and observational data, supplemented with self-reports of VR sickness, presence and flow. Practical design insights were then constructed along the dimensions of cybersickness, affordances, space and user interfaces.

This demo presents a virtual reality (VR) environment developed for evaluating signalized and unsignalized intersection scenarios using low cost head-mounted devices (HMD). Prior work focused on VR simulations that re-create less complex scenarios for the evaluation of different autonomous vehicle (AV) behavior and external human-machine interfaces (eHMIs). The proposed VR environment allows participants to walk across multiple road lanes, and experience and interact with high fidelity simulated traffic scenarios, including signalized and unsignalized intersections at 1:1 scale, with vehicular traffic making turns, and providing audio feedback. This simulation can be used for conducting user studies to test AV eHMIs or behavior interventions with participants.

The term vulnerable road users (VRU) refers to those at higher risk when in traffic. VRUs are usually unprotected while in motion and will sustain greater injuries in vehicular collisions, or potentially fatalities. In this group, pedestrians and cyclists therefore have a lower chance of survival in accidents when compared to other road users, and are likely to suffer sub-stantial implications from autonomous vehicle (AV) deployments. Hence, it is crucial to focus on their safety. First, a taxonomy of categories of common cyclist-vehicle traffic scenarios is defined for development and re-creation within a simulator. A virtual reality (VR) cycling simulator framework, populated with AVs, is then described. It is proposed for the VR simulator to be used to study the cyclists' behavior and actions towards simulations of a future traffic environment involving encountering AVs in various road scenarios.