The growing attention towards immersive technologies such as augmented reality (AR), virtual reality (VR), mixed reality (MR), extended reality (XR), and the metaverse are revolutionizing cultural heritage education and tourism. Such technologies offer immersive and interactive experiences that transform the user’s exploration of museums, cultural heritage sites, educational content, and historical landmarks. This article presents a structured framework that addresses the advancement and application of these technologies in cultural heritage education to improve user experience, learning, emotional connection, and motivation. To further explore recent trends, issues, and opportunities, the article offers a comprehensive overview of the impact of state-of-the-art immersive technology on user experience within heritage education environments . The study also outlined standard questionnaires and effective methodologies for user experience evaluations. Furthermore, the article addresses the influence of standards and guidelines recommended by standardized bodies and organizations on XR and metaverse applications. It discussed how these standards and recommendations can play a role in setting protocols that shape the development of immersive heritage education environments. Finally, we introduce an architecture model for XR and metaverse applications that can assess developers, researchers, and stakeholders to enable immersive and interactive educational experiences, bridging geographical and physical barriers. This research is intended to help academic and industry stakeholders understand the integration of digital heritage preservation tools and user experience standards critical to advancing educational engagement in cultural heritage.

Underwater Wireless Sensor Networks (UWSNs) have emerged as a remarkable interest for scholars worldwide in terms of various applications such as monitoring offshore oil and gas reservoirs, pollution, oceans for defense, and other applications such as tsunami. Terrestrial Wireless Sensor Networks (TWSN) and UWSNs share many characteristics apart from having different communication medium and working environment as UWSNs face the challenges of low-bandwidth, long latency, and high bit error rate. These have caused for UWSNs many problems such as low reliability, packet retransmission, and high consumption of energy. To alleviate the aforementioned issues, many techniques have been proposed. However, most of them merely consider the issue of hotspot which occurs due to the unbalanced transmission of load on sensor nodes near the surface sink. In this article, we propose a multi-layer cluster-based Energy Efficient (MLCEE) protocol for UWSNs to address the issue of hotspot and energy consumption. There are different stages in MLCEE, first of which is the division of the whole network in layers, the second is clustering of the nodes at same layers. In the last stage of transmission, the cluster head (CH) selects the next hop among the CHs based on greater fitness value, small Hopid and small layer number. To mitigate the issue of hotspot, the first layer remains un-clustered and any node in the first layer transfers data to the sink directly while cluster heads (CHs) are selected based on Bayesian Probability and residual energy. The simulation results of the proposed technique, done using MATLAB, have revealed that MLCEE achieves superior performance than the other techniques with regard to the network lifetime, energy consumption, and data transmission amount.

360-degree video provides an immersive experience to end-users through Virtual Reality (VR) Head-Mounted-Displays (HMDs). However, it is not trivial to understand the Quality of Experience (QoE) of 360-degree video since user experience is influenced by various factors that affect QoE when watching a 360-degree video in VR. This manuscript presents a machine learning-based QoE prediction of 360-degree video in VR, considering the two key QoE aspects: perceptual quality and cybersickness. In addition, we proposed two new QoE-affecting factors: user’s familiarity with VR and user’s interest in 360-degree video for the QoE evaluation. To aim this, we first conduct a subjective experiment on 96 video samples and collect datasets from 29 users for perceptual quality and cybersickness. We design a new Logistic Regression (LR) based model for QoE prediction in terms of perceptual quality. The prediction accuracy of the proposed model is compared against well-known supervised machine-learning algorithms such as k-Nearest Neighbors (kNN), Support Vector Machine (SVM), and Decision Tree (DT) with respect to accuracy rate, recall, f1-score, precision, and mean absolute error (MAE). LR performs well with 86% accuracy, which is in close agreement with subjective opinion. The prediction accuracy of the proposed model is then compared with existing QoE models in terms of perceptual quality. Finally, we build a Neural Network-based model for the QoE prediction in terms of cybersickness. The proposed model performs well against the state of the art QoE prediction methods in terms of cybersickness.

The degradation of water quality has become a critical concern worldwide, necessitating innovative approaches for monitoring and predicting water quality. This paper proposes an integrated framework that combines the Internet of Things (IoT) and machine learning paradigms for comprehensive water quality analysis and prediction. The IoT-enabled framework comprises four modules: sensing, coordinator, data processing, and decision. The IoT framework is equipped with temperature, pH, turbidity, and Total Dissolved Solids (TDS) sensors to collect the data from Rohri Canal, SBA, Pakistan. The acquired data is preprocessed and then analyzed using machine learning models to predict the Water Quality Index (WQI) and Water Quality Class (WQC). With this aim, we designed a machine learning-enabled framework for water quality analysis and prediction. Preprocessing steps such as data cleaning, normalization using the Z-score technique, correlation, and splitting are performed before applying machine learning models. Regression models: LSTM (Long Short-Term Memory), SVR (Support Vector Regression), MLP (Multilayer Perceptron) and NARNet (Nonlinear Autoregressive Network) are employed to predict the WQI, and classification models: SVM (Support Vector Machine), XGBoost (eXtreme Gradient Boosting), Decision Trees, and Random Forest are employed to predict the WQC. Before that, the Dataset used for evaluating machine learning models is split into two subsets: Dataset 1 and Dataset 2. Dataset 1 comprises 600 values for each parameter, while Dataset 2 includes the complete set of 6000 values for each parameter. This division enables comparison and evaluation of the models’ performance. The results indicate that the MLP regression model has strong predictive performance with the lowest Mean Absolute Error (MAE), Mean Squared Error (MSE), and Root Mean Squared Error (RMSE) values, along with the highest R-squared (0.93), indicating accurate and precise predictions. In contrast, the SVR model demonstrates weaker performance, evidenced by higher errors and a lower R-squared (0.73). Among classification algorithms, the Random Forest achieves the highest metrics: accuracy (0.91), precision (0.93), recall (0.92), and F1-score (0.91). It is also conceived that the machine learning models perform better when applied to datasets with smaller numbers of values compared to datasets with larger numbers of values. Moreover, comparisons with existing studies reveal this study’s improved regression performance, with consistently lower errors and higher R-squared values. For classification, the Random Forest model outperforms others, with exceptional accuracy, precision, recall, and F1-score metrics.