This paper presents a prototype of a virtual reality (VR) system to teach the basic concepts of programming called VR‐OCKS. The system is inspired by other visual languages such as Scratch or Kodu, and it works by proposing to the user the resolution of simple puzzles in a 3D environment. Several basic commands to a humanoid character, such as advance or turn, together with control flow structures like iteration and conditional selections, are needed to provide a solution for increasingly difficult challenges. Our aim is to attract users, usually children and teenagers, into the world of programming by taking advantage of the appeal and potential of VR. The use of VR‐OCKS strengthened the spatial orientation and autonomy of the users, in addition to enhancing common sense, creative thinking, and systematic reasoning. In our experiments, VR‐OCKS was accepted by adults and children alike and it showed great potential as an educational tool.

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The Subjective Visual Vertical (SVV) is a common test for evaluating the perception of verticality. Altered verticality has been connected with disorders in the otolithic, visual or proprioceptive systems, caused by stroke, Parkinson's disease or multiple sclerosis, among others. Currently, this test is carried out using a variety of specific, mostly homemade apparatuses that include moving planes, buckets, hemispheric domes or a line projected in a screen. Our aim is to develop a flexible, inexpensive, user-friendly and easily extensible system based on virtual reality for the measurement of the SVV and several related visual diagnostic tests, and validate it through an experimental evaluation. Two different hardware configurations were tested with 50 healthy volunteers in a controlled environment; 28 of them were males and 22 females, with ages ranging from 18 to 49 years, being 23 the average age. The Intraclass Correlation Coefficient (ICC) was computed in each device. In addition, a usability survey was conducted. ICC = 0.85 in the first configuration (CI = 0.75-0.92), ICC = 0.76 in the second configuration (CI = 0.61-0.87), both with 95% of confidence, which means a substantial reliability. Moreover, 92.2% of subjects rated the usability of the system as "very good". Our evaluation showed that the proposed system is suitable for the measurement of SVV in healthy subjects. The next step is to perform a more elaborated experimentation on patients and compare the results with the measurements obtained from traditional methods.