This article investigates the use of 3D immersive virtual environments and 3D prints for interaction with past material culture over traditional observation without manipulation. Our work is motivated by studies in heritage, museum, and cognitive sciences indicating the importance of object manipulation for understanding present and ancient artifacts. While virtual immersive environments and 3D prints have started to be incorporated in heritage research and museum displays as a way to provide improved manipulation experiences, little is known about how these new technologies affect the perception of our past. This article provides first results obtained with three experiments designed to investigate the benefits and tradeoffs in using these technologies. Our results indicate that traditional museum displays limit the experience with past material culture, and reveal how our sample of participants favor tactile and immersive 3D virtual experiences with artifacts over visual non-manipulative experiences with authentic objects.

Thanks to recent advances on motion capture devices and stereoscopic consumer displays, animated virtual characters can now realistically interact with users in a variety of applications. We investigate in this paper the effect of avatars, stereo vision and display size on task execution in immersive virtual environments. We report results obtained with three experiments in varied configurations that are commonly used in rehabilitation applications. The first experiment analyzes the accuracy of reaching tasks under different system configurations: with and without an avatar, with and without stereo vision, and employing a 2D desktop monitor versus a large multi-tile visualization display. The second experiment analyzes the use of avatars and user-perspective stereo vision on the ability to perceive and subsequently reproduce motions demonstrated by an autonomous virtual character. The third experiment evaluates the overall user experience with a complete immersive user interface for motion modeling by direct demonstration. Our experiments expose and quantify the benefits of using stereo vision and avatars, and show that the use of avatars improve the quality of produced motions and the resemblance of replicated msotions; however, direct interaction in user-perspective leads to tasks executed in less time and to targets more accurately reached. These and additional tradeoffs are important for the effective design of avatar-based training systems.

We present new solutions based on Virtual Reality technologies for improving the delivery of physical therapy and rehabilitation. Three main aspects are addressed: 1) the ability to allow therapists to create new exercises and therapy programs intuitively by direct demonstration, 2) automatic therapy delivery and monitoring with the use of an autonomous virtual tutor that can monitor and quantitatively assess the motions performed by the patient, and 3) networked collaborative remote therapy sessions via connected applications displaying the motions of both the therapist and the patient.We also provide 3D assessment tools for monitoring changes in the range of motion, and for allowing the visualization of a number of properties during or after the execution of exercises. The presented system has been implemented for a low-cost hardware solution based on Kinect and for a high-end immersive virtual reality facility.

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