As the need for sensors increases with the inception of virtual reality, augmented reality and mixed reality, the purpose of this paper is to evaluate the suitability of the two Kinect devices and the Leap Motion Controller. When evaluating the suitability, the authors’ focus was on the state of the art, device comparison, accuracy, precision, existing gesture recognition algorithms and on the price of the devices. The aim of this study is to give an insight whether these devices could substitute more expensive sensors in the industry or on the market. While in general the answer is yes, it is not as easy as it seems: There are significant differences between the devices, even between the two Kinects, such as different measurement ranges, error distributions on each axis and changing depth precision relative to distance.

This paper presents the analyzed results of a virtual reality application which allowsmeasuringspatial skills of the users. The application contains mental rotation tests of three types and can be used on a computer with desktop displays and on Android with the Gear VR device. The authors measured the spatial ability of 61 students with the Gear VR andof240 students with a desktop display.By investigating the correct answer ratios,comparisonsweredone between the age, the gender, the primary hand, what the students are majoring in, moreover the display devices. The use of the Gear VR significantly improved on theaverageperformance of female studentsby 18.02%,onleft-handedstudentsby 18.66%, on older studentsby 7.29%and made the purdue spatial visualization test easier by 17.21% compared to the use of adesktop display.These results also strengthen the factthat education has a future in virtual reality.

The “Souls-like” role-playing video game genre was inadvertently created due to the influence of the “Souls franchise”. However, each game has different twists which can be new gameplay mechanics, graphical style, etc. while maintaining the core elements of the “Souls franchise”. The goal of this study is to understand which gameplay mechanics are more liked by comparing reviews of these games to each other. Thus, different game design elements and game mechanics are investigated in 21 “Souls-like” video games to see how the users reacted to them and whether they positively reviewed them. All (993,932) reviews were scraped from the Steam webpage regarding these games in the middle of April 2021 using the steam_reviews Python package. These reviews contain the playtime at review, whether a positive or negative rating is given, and a textual component among others. Overall, 11 various game design elements and game mechanics were set up for the investigation: the setting, graphical dimensions as well as style, level design, and whether there are difficulty settings, multiplayer features, upgradeable weapons/armor, equipment durability, in-game map, extra penalties upon death, and a classic level-up system. Based on data distributions, either the t-test or the Mann-Whitney-Wilcoxon test was used for the analysis. The syuzhet package, which uses Natural Language Processing methods, was used in the statistical program package R along with the NRC Emotion Lexicon to evaluate the textual parts. According to the results, a slight-to-moderate correlation exists between positive reviews and the users’ playtimes: more playtimes mean a larger chance of having positive reviews. Significant differences also exist in the percentages of positive reviews among these games: Hollow Knight is the most liked game. Out of the investigated 11 factors, significant differences exist among all of them: drawn graphics (96.48%) and 2D style (95.61%) are the two most liked factors, while pixel graphics (87.11%) and a futuristic setting (86.74%) are the two least liked ones. Almost every factor can significantly affect all eight basic emotions (anger, anticipation, disgust, fear, joy, sadness, surprise, trust). The exceptions are graphical dimensions, weapon/armor upgradability, in-game map, and extra penalties upon character death as no significant differences exist in case of trust (p = 0.85), anger (p = 0.24), sadness (p = 0.21) and disgust (p = 0.095), respectively when the average sentiments per review were examined. Future “Souls-like” game design and development can be influenced by the results as game developers can more easily choose from the factors they want to implement or whether they want them at all in their games.

Since 1996, web accessibility evaluation has been an important aspect of web development to increase social inclusion for people with special needs. Several web accessibility evaluation and testing tools have been developed to automatically evaluate websites in order to identify barriers for people with disabilities. The developed tools are significant since their aim is to effectively represent accessibility issues. However, a few issues with website accessibility cannot be identified through the existing accessibility testing tools due to several limitations, including (i) inappropriate guideline selection, (ii) ambiguities in guideline understanding, (iii) avoiding user and expert suggestions as evaluation criteria, (iv) limited consideration of semantic perspectives, and (iv) unwillingness to incorporate the updated engineering methods. Therefore, reported results may be unclear and inappropriate for some users. Such limitations are critical factors that reduce the effectiveness of the developed tools. These issues cause unwillingness to use a particular tool or possible adoption of other tools. In this situation, we must identify which aspects are important to incorporate in the development in order to make the developed solution more effective as it allows users to make their website accessible to people with disabilities. In this paper, first, we present a literature review of different existing solutions for web accessibility testing to identify their challenges and limitations. Following the reported findings, we propose an automated web accessibility evaluation framework addressing several accessibility aspects to improve the evaluation results by mitigating the limitations of existing solutions. The proposed framework is validated by comparing it with existing automated solutions considering their functional properties. The proposed accessibility framework might be beneficial for web developers, accessibility engineers, and other practitioners to incorporate into their development and research.

People with visual impairment suffer from several challenges in their daily activities. A lot of research has been done to find solutions to help people with visual impairment performing tasks like navigation. Thanks to the global positioning system which solve the problem of outdoor navigation while indoor navigation remains problematic. This paper has focused on using assistive technology to help people with visual impairment in navigating indoor using markers. The main contributions of this paper are the following: 1) The authors have implemented a prototype of a navigation system which identifies the location of people with visual impairment using computer vision tags. 2) The authors have compared ArUco Markers with QR codes to select which one is better.