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The study aims to introduce a cloud-based virtual reality (VR) approach and investigate its applicability and performance in aiding the remote design evaluation process by assessing the clients' convenience perception toward cloud-based VR-aided design evaluation (Cloud-based VR Approach) compared to 3D model-aided design evaluation (3D Model Approach) and rendering images-aided design evaluation (Image Approach).

A multicriteria comparative study was conducted with 26 university students using the “analytic hierarchy process” technique to compare the three approaches applied to home finishing material selection tasks based on the five “service convenience” dimensions, consisting of access convenience, decision convenience, transaction convenience, benefit convenience and post-benefit convenience.

The results indicated that the “Cloud-based VR Approach” was perceived to be more convenient than the “3D Model Approach” and the “Image Approach” based on the aspects of “decision convenience”, “transaction convenience”, “benefit convenience” and “post-benefit convenience”. The only aspect that the Cloud-based VR Approach was comparatively less convenient than the 3D Model Approach and Image Approach for the user was “access convenience”. Overall, the findings showed that the developed Cloud-based VR Approach had more potential than the conventional approaches in aiding the design evaluation process under ongoing social distancing measures requiring designers and clients to work remotely.

The disastrous impacts of the COVID-19 pandemic on logistical systems have resulted in massive disruptions to the construction industry worldwide. Various construction activities have been halted and most meetings moved online. Design evaluation conducted between clients and designers is one of the important activities affected by such an impact. Thus, this study presents the Cloud-based VR Approach as an innovative means to maintain essential ongoing activities and meeting of the current design evaluation approach with respect to the social distancing measures.

This chapter focuses on visualization. Seeing the humanities differently is one of the amazing benefits of working with tools mentioned within this category. Whether it be more traditional visualizations like images or video or that which is considered a bit more advanced like augmented or virtual reality, the enhanced perspective gained through the use of these tools offers digital humanities scholars unprecedented disciplinary perspectives while helping to shape new research areas, questions, and understanding of humanity and culture. In addition to visualization and issues related to it, this chapter also examines gaming and how games and play are impacting the digital humanities in exciting ways.

This paper aims to examine how media play a role in community responses to disaster. The authors explore how communication technology may allow new relationships between community groups and emergency agencies. The authors examine the context within which warnings and risk communication are interpreted by media services. The authors observe how, in an emergency context, the thinking about media may change from that of a linear framework of information provision to one of shared resources.

The authors focus on Second Life, a shared, online space which uses 3D graphic images to simulate a virtual environment. Second Life is posited as a media tool with clear advantages for the training of emergency services professionals and citizens in the community. The authors observe emergency training scenarios and advantages for training for critical thinking and decision-making.

The authors observe then how virtual worlds such as Second Life provide an online forum in which participants can interact, communicate and simulate action in a complex 3D graphic environment. Second Life may be a useful medium for simulating and testing geo-physical and social manoeuvres using the modeling tools. This may allow for collaborative decision-making in simulations which can prepare or rehearse people for emergency conditions. It may be useful in an emergency with information streamed and coordinated at a single online site. A shared network like Second Life may be shared by many people co-synchronously or a-synchronously, despite their geographic distance. Second Life applications may also be useful in the aftermath of emergencies for design and rebuilding, for analytical and educational purposes.

It is clear that social networks like Second Life provide a valuable tool with which to learn about and share data and information about bushfires, community emergencies and safety precautions in a social setting. It can also provide, at the local level, a forum for community information and discussion, as well as for counselling and reconstruction in the aftermath.

The authors suggest that the range and flexibility of tools and their excellent geographic visualization and social networking functions may in future allow for learning and decision-making among diverse and disparate groups who can come together in virtual space. It is especially useful in remote communities as a means of uniting people who are otherwise isolated by distance or trapped in emergency situations. Second Life is useful for sharing information, organizational and local knowledge about disaster and mitigation management. This media-rich platform is valuable to a community that is increasingly adept with shared, 3D graphic computer interfaces.

Applications like Second Life may provide a space where users can access a range of tools as a means of informing, educating, empowering and warning participants in emergency scenarios, both real and simulated. They are more than virtual spaces; they are also social spaces. A platform like Second Life may provide a virtual solution for such communication challenges especially where communities are too remote, too dispersed or even too many in number to be easily accessible in the field.

This paper contains new and significant information about emerging communication systems and platforms that may be of use to those researching and planning around disaster management, mitigation and resilience. It addresses the use of new techniques which are the result of innovation in technology, software design and network design. It applies a discussion of these techniques to several hypothetical and real-life scenarios to explore the potential for virtual tools as a way of providing enriched information, mapping and communication tools across a range of disaster response scenarios.

The purpose of this paper is to examine the application of low-end, low-fidelity (gaming/consumer-level) haptic devices for medical-based, surgical skills development (surgical bone-based drilling in particular) with serious games and virtual simulations as an affordable training solution with the potential of complementing current and traditional training methods.

The authors present the adaptation of two low-end haptic devices (Novint Falcon and Geomagic 3D Touch) to simulate a surgical drill drilling through bone for a serious game developed for total knee arthroplasty training. The implementation was possible through the analysis of the bone drilling mechanics. The authors provide a quantitative comparison of both haptic devices with respect to forces, movements, and development.

Although further testing is required, the initial results demonstrate that the low-end, consumer-level haptic devices can be incorporated into virtual environments/serious games to allow for the simulation of surgical drilling. The authors also believe that the results will generalize and allow these devices to be used to simulate a variety of technical-based medical procedures.

In contrast to previous work where the focus is placed on cost-prohibitive haptic devices, this approach considers affordable consumer-level solutions that can be easily incorporated into a variety of serious games and virtual simulations. This holds promise that haptic-based virtual simulation and serious games become more widespread, ultimately ensuring that medical trainees are better prepared before exposure to live patients.

This paper aims to explore the opportunities and challenges that immersive virtual reality (VR) technologies pose for archival theory and practice.

This conceptual paper reviews research on VR adoption in information institutions and the preservation challenges of VR to identify ways in which VR has the potential to disrupt existing archival theory and practice.

Existing archival approaches are found to be disrupted by the multi-layered structural characteristics of VR, the part–whole relationships between the technological elements of VR environments and the three-dimensional content they contain and the immersive, experiential nature of VR experiences. This paper argues that drawing on perspectives from phenomenology and digital materiality is helpful for addressing the preservation challenges of VR.

The findings extend conceptualizations of preservation by identifying gaps in existing preservation approaches to VR and stressing the importance of “experience” as a central element of archival practice and by emphasizing the embodied dimensions of interpreting archival records and the multiple scales of materiality that archival researchers and practitioners should consider to preserve VR.

These findings provide guidance for digital curators and preservationists by outlining the current thinking on VR preservation and the impact of VR on digital preservation strategies.

This paper gives new insight into VR as an emerging area of concern to digital curation and preservation and expands archival thinking with new conceptualizations that disrupt existing paradigms.

The purpose of this paper is to address the problems of the current facilities maintenance management (FMM) system in finding necessary information, identifying defective facilities and prioritizing maintenance work orders.

In this paper, in conjunction with building information modeling, a system is proposed to perform a preliminary inspection of each maintenance request, provide FMM staff with the location of the faulty facility and its associated details and provide recommendations for prioritizing repair work orders. Unity and Revit are used to implement the proposed system and a case study is conducted to demonstrate its effectiveness.

An augmented reality (AR)-FMM system was developed using the AR technique in this paper. This system provides the related information even if the FMM receives a problem report without facility information from the occupant and performs a preliminary inspection so that the faulty facility and the route to it are identified. In addition, a work order sequence of pending requests was provided. The visualization of the facility using AR technology has brought great convenience and ease to FMM staff.

This paper addresses the problems encountered in the current facility maintenance management system concerning AR technology.

The purpose of this paper is to explore the use of virtual reality environments (VRE) for maintenance activities by augmenting a virtual facility representation and integrating relevant information regarding the status of systems and the space itself, while providing simple ways to control them.

The research focuses in the implementation of a VRE prototype of a building management system using game engine technologies. To evaluate the prototype, a usability study has been conducted that contrasts the virtual reality interface with a corresponding legacy application showing the users perception in terms of productivity improvement of facilities management (FM) tasks.

The usability tests conducted indicated that VREs have the potential to increase the productivity in maintenance tasks. Users without training demonstrated a high degree of engagement and performance operating a VRE interface, when compared with that of a legacy application. The potential drop in user time and increase in engagement with a VRE will eventually translate into lower cost and to an increase in quality.

To date no commonly accepted data model has been proposed to serve as the integrated data model to support facility operation. Although BIM models have gained increased acceptance in architecture engineering and construction activities they are not fully adequate to support data exchange in the post-handover (operation) phase. The presented research developed and tested a prototype able to handle and integrate data in a flexible and dynamic way, which is essential in management activities underlying FM.

Automated dust monitoring in workplaces helps provide timely alerts to over-exposed workers and effective mitigation measures for proactive dust control. However, the cluttered nature of construction sites poses a practical challenge to obtain enough high-quality images in the real world. The study aims to establish a framework that overcomes the challenges of lacking sufficient imagery data (“data-hungry problem”) for training computer vision algorithms to monitor construction dust.

This study develops a synthetic image generation method that incorporates virtual environments of construction dust for producing training samples. Three state-of-the-art object detection algorithms, including Faster-RCNN, you only look once (YOLO) and single shot detection (SSD), are trained using solely synthetic images. Finally, this research provides a comparative analysis of object detection algorithms for real-world dust monitoring regarding the accuracy and computational efficiency.

This study creates a construction dust emission (CDE) dataset consisting of 3,860 synthetic dust images as the training dataset and 1,015 real-world images as the testing dataset. The YOLO-v3 model achieves the best performance with a 0.93 F1 score and 31.44 fps among all three object detection models. The experimental results indicate that training dust detection algorithms with only synthetic images can achieve acceptable performance on real-world images.

This study provides insights into two questions: (1) how synthetic images could help train dust detection models to overcome data-hungry problems and (2) how well state-of-the-art deep learning algorithms can detect nonrigid construction dust.

This study aims to investigate the combined effects of product design and environment congruence on consumers’ aesthetic, affective and behavioral responses.

Two lab experiments with a 2 (high-level design cues vs low-level design cues) × 2 (congruent environment vs non-congruent environment) between-subjects design were conducted to test the hypotheses. The experimental stimuli (product: digital camera; environment: product display in a retail environment) were presented in a 3D simulation environment using a large TV (Experiment 1) and a stereoscopic virtual reality headset.

The results support the notion that product design cues elicit more positive aesthetic and affective responses. Environment congruence, on the other hand, plays a moderating role; product design cues elicit more favorable consumer responses in a congruent environment. In contrast, no such effect was found in a non-congruent environment.

Creating a congruent environment is only effective for well-designed products. In contrast, for products with low-level design elements, the congruence of promotional environment is not instrumental and may not elicit more favorable responses. Hence, such products can simply be presented in a generic display, especially considering the significant costs associated with designing, building and setting up a congruent display.

Despite the empirical findings supporting the significant role of product design and environment congruence on consumers’ perceptual and behavioral responses, there is a paucity of research on the combined effect of these two factors. The present investigation is an attempt to fill this gap and challenges the generalizations made in previous research suggesting that a product’s environment must be aligned with the design elements embedded in the product.

In recent years, there has been significant interest in adopting XR (extended reality) technologies such as VR (virtual reality) and AR (augmented reality), particularly in retail. However, extending activities through reality-mediation is still mostly believed to offer an inferior experience due to their shortcomings in usability, wearability, graphical fidelity, etc. This study aims to address the research gap by experimentally examining the acceptance of metaverse shopping.

This study conducts a 2 (VR: with vs. without) × 2 (AR: with vs. without) between-subjects laboratory experiment involving 157 participants in simulated daily shopping environments. This study builds a physical brick-and-mortar store at the campus and stocked it with approximately 600 products with accompanying product information and pricing. The XR devices and a 3D laser scanner were used in constructing the three XR shopping conditions.

Results indicate that XR can offer an experience comparable to, or even surpassing, traditional shopping in terms of its instrumental and hedonic aspects, regardless of a slightly reduced perception of usability. AR negatively affected perceived ease of use, while VR significantly increased perceived enjoyment. It is surprising that the lower perceived ease of use appeared to be disconnected from the attitude toward metaverse shopping.

This study provides important experimental evidence on the acceptance of XR shopping, and the finding that low perceived ease of use may not always be detrimental adds to the theory of technology adoption as a whole. Additionally, it provides an important reference point for future randomized controlled studies exploring the effects of technology on adoption.