The current bare Internet of Things (IoT) infrastructure has recently been extended to include smarter and more effective user interactions. Individual or meaningful sets and groups of IoT objects can be imbued with data and/or content in a distributed manner and efficiently utilized by the client. This distribution makes it possible to scale and customize interaction techniques such as augmented reality (AR). This paper proposes an architecture for combining the AR interface with IoT for an improved shopping experience. The proposed architecture is distributed and therefore scalable such that any IoT product can be accessed on the spot locally without any server restriction and provide intuitive AR-based visualization and interaction for a flexible product trial in the showroom. We identify three key architectural components required to support such a seamless and scalable AR service and experience for IoT-ready products: (1) object-centric data management and visualization, (2) mechanism for accessing, controlling, and interacting with the object, and (3) content exchange interoperability. We illustrate the possible scenarios of shopping in the future with the interactive and smart digital information combined with the analog, that is, the real world. A proof-of-concept implementation is presented as applied to such a “digital–analog” style of shopping. In addition, its usability is experimentally assessed as compared to using the conventional control interface. Our experimental study shows that the subjects clearly experience higher usability and greater satisfaction with AR-interactive shopping, thereby demonstrating the potential of the proposed approach.

Accompanying the advent of wireless networking and the Internet of Things (IoT), traditional augmented reality (AR) systems to visualize virtual 3D models of the real world are evolving into smart and interactive AR related to the context of things for physical objects. We propose the integration of AR and IoT in a complementary way, making AR scalable to cover objects everywhere with an acceptable level of performance and interacting with IoT in a more intuitive manner. We identify three key components for realizing such a synergistic integration: (1) distributed and object-centric data management (including for AR services); (2) IoT object-guided tracking; (3) seamless interaction and content interoperability. We survey the current state of these respective areas and herein discuss research on issues about realizing a future smart and interactive living environment.

Humans spend a significant portion of their daily life in cars. In this study, we investigate a method to reduce motion sickness and allow people to use virtual reality (VR) while riding in cars. As the sickness arises primarily from the sensory conflict between visual and actual (or vestibular) motions, the proposed approach attempts to resolve the mismatch by mixing in and visualizing the estimated information of the actual motion, which is sensed by the on-board diagnostics and inertial measurement unit modules attached to the vehicle. We conduct a pilot experiment to validate our approach by comparing the sickness levels before and after implementing the approach in three in-car VR usage conditions: (1) Default – using the VR content without modification; (2) transparent wall – using the VR content with its background scene changing depending on the car motion; (3) particle flow – mixing in the VR content with the estimated motion flow of the car visualized as moving particles. Our experimental results show that motion sickness is reduced significantly (but not eliminated to a negligible level) using our approach.

Background: Although it has been well demonstrated that the efficacy of virtual reality therapy for social anxiety disorder is comparable to that of traditional cognitive behavioral therapy, little is known about the effect of virtual reality on pathological self-referential processes in individuals with social anxiety disorder. Objective: We aimed to determine changes in self-referential processing and their neural mechanisms following virtual reality treatment. Methods: We recruited participants with and without a primary diagnosis of social anxiety disorder to undergo clinical assessments (Social Phobia Scale and Post-Event Rumination Scale) and functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) scans. Participants with social anxiety disorder received virtual reality–based exposure treatment for 6 sessions starting immediately after baseline testing. After the sixth session, participants with social anxiety disorder completed follow-up scans during which they were asked to judge whether a series of words (positive, negative, neutral) was relevant to them. Results: Of 25 individuals with social anxiety disorder who participated in the study, 21 completed the sessions and follow-up; 22 control individuals also participated. There were no significant differences in age (P=.36), sex (P=.71), or handedness (P=.51) between the groups. Whole-brain analysis revealed that participants in the social anxiety disorder group had increased neural responses during positive self-referential processing in the medial temporal and frontal cortexes compared with those in the control group. Participants in the social anxiety disorder group also showed increased left insular activation and decreased right middle frontal gyrus activation during negative self-referential processing. After undergoing virtual reality–based therapy, overall symptoms of the participants with social anxiety disorder were reduced, and these participants exhibited greater activity in a brain regions responsible for self-referential and autobiographical memory processes while viewing positive words during postintervention fMRI scans. Interestingly, the greater the blood oxygen level dependent changes related to positive self-referential processing, the lower the tendency to ruminate on the negative events and the lower the social anxiety following the virtual reality session. Compared with that at baseline, higher activation was also found within broad somatosensory areas in individuals with social anxiety disorder during negative self-referential processing following virtual reality therapy. Conclusions: These fMRI findings might reflect the enhanced physiological and cognitive processing in individuals with social anxiety disorder in response to self-referential information. They also provide neural evidence of the effect of virtual reality exposure therapy on social anxiety and self-derogation.