Summaries week 10

The Uncanny Valley: Effect of Realism on the Impression of Artificial Human Faces:

This paper discusses the uncanny valley where when human like things are highly realistic, people find them unpleasant.  The experiments done in the paper were done to look at where the uncanny valley was and how different factors attributed to it.  The study was done online and had participants look at virtual faces that morphed into very human like faces.  The participants rated the pleasantness of the faces thorough the morphing process.  The main facial feature that caused unpleasant ness was the eyes.

Variations in Physiological Responses of Participants During Different Stages of an Immersive Virtual Environment Experiment:

This paper looks into stress levels in immersive virtual environments.  The purpose of the experiments was to look at what stress levels can be triggered in a virtual environment and if they can come close to real world experiences.  The experiments were conducted in a CAVE to provide the best immersion.  The studies found that initially stress levels were high, most likely due to interacting in the new environment and getting use to the controls.  After the participants would get use to the new environment and controls their stress levels went down.  Near the end of the experiments participants stress levels would go up, probably due to boredom.

Physiological Measures of Presence in Stressful Virtual Environments:

This paper used different physiological measures to measure presence in a stressful virtual environment.  An experiment was setup that involved the participant to wear gear that displayed a virtual environment to the  user.  The virtual environment consisted of a training room where the participant would get use to wearing the gear and a pit room thats purpose was to introduce stress into the virtual environment.  In the pit room participants were asked to drop balls into the pit and try to hit targets.  One main feature of the pit room was a “diving board” that was simulated in the real-world with a piece of plywood so that participants could have tactile feedback with objects in the virtual environment.  The main measure of the participants stress level was an increase in heart rate and higher frame rates for the video feed produced a more stressful virtual environment.

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