We are experiencing an upcoming trend of using head mounted display systems in games and serious games, which is likely to become an established practice in the near future. While these systems provide highly immersive experiences, many users have been reporting discomfort symptoms, such as nausea, sickness, and headaches, among others. When using VR for health applications, this is more critical, since the discomfort may interfere a lot in treatments. In this work we discuss possible causes of these issues, and present possible solutions as design guidelines that may mitigate them. In this context, we go deeper within a dynamic focus solution to reduce discomfort in immersive virtual environments, when using first-person navigation. This solution applies an heuristic model of visual attention that works in real time. This work also discusses a case study (as a first-person spatial shooter demo) that applies this solution and the proposed design guidelines.

Software development is a challenging, but seldom amusing activity. At the same time, gamification, a recent trend that brings game mechanics to websites and interactive media, together with many past works that propose the use of serious games to teach software engineering in a fun way, show evidence that this type of real-world activity can also incorporate game design elements. In this work, we propose a novel approach: incorporating game mechanics directly into a software development process, effectively turning it into a live game. We show interesting results from a case study with a production team of a software house, and firmly believe it is important that the game academic community spreads this type of knowledge to influence other research areas.

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