Research Roundup (#4)
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Welcome...
Welcome to the fourth-ever Research Roundup! A weekly catch-up on the latest developments in the field of XR research.
It’s been a busy week, so let's not hang around.
The Week in 3 (Sentences)
- AR in education gained momentum this week, with studies showing enhanced learning and engagement across diverse domains including engineering education, pre-school reading comprehension, and anatomical training.
- Research on professional XR training demonstrated real-world impact, with research validating its use for firefighter preparation and precision surgical procedures, and a new framework proposed for lunar mission training.
- And there were more advances for VR in healthcare this week focused on the patient experience with research on the benefits for breast cancer patients' mental health, anaesthesia consent processes, and architectural design of medical facilities.
The Week in 300 (Words)
One of the biggest challenges in XR for education is showing large measurable benefits other than motivation and engagement. It was, therefore, great to see this new paper using AR for storytelling with four and five-year-old children. Different children either heard a story read the traditional way or read by the teacher with the AR storytelling app adding voiceovers and animations. The ability to retell the story and comprehension were assessed both pre-test and post-test, with participants performing better at both following the use of the app. Perhaps most impressive was the size of the effects, which were statistically "very large" for both outcomes (Cohen's d > 1).
It's been argued for a long time that VR is perfect for professional training in situations that are dangerous or otherwise difficult to replicate in real life. VR training for firefighters therefore seems an obvious route. However, this paper was particularly intriguing because the psychological impact of the experience was also considered. Measures for positive and negative affect were taken as participants used a sophisticated multimodal training experience. The VR conditions generally increased positive affect, even in mundane and non-dangerous scenarios. The authors argue that this could be a protective factor to the more emotionally scarring aspects of training for dangerous situations. The extent to which this is true remains to be tested, but it is an intriguing possibility.
And finally, while implementing VR for good in healthcare is important, decision-makers often have to find cost efficiencies too. Researchers this week explored if the process for gaining consent for anaesthesia could be facilitated by VR instead. When admitted for orthopaedic surgery, participants were randomly allocated to a control or a VR-assisted experimental group. Alongside the usual measures of acceptance of the technology were the time savings and associated cost efficiencies. Not only was the VR-assisted process well received by patients, but it also led to significantly shorter times with the anaesthesiologist, leading to statistically significant cost savings and freeing up their time for other activities.
Paper of the Week
Our paper of the week this week is all about the perception of weight in AR using minimal haptic feedback. Haptics continue to be a hot topic in XR as researchers and developers try to solve the problem of creating a genuinely multimodal experience beyond the audio-visual experience which dominates.
How we perceive gravity in AR is a particularly hot topic, as it is an essential component of our everyday lives. The researchers noted that most solutions to date focus on VR, but these can't always be readily applied to mixed reality. The solution they developed involved a haptic feedback stand connected to the participant's hand, which provided force feedback when completing various block sorting tasks with the now-retired Hololens 2.
Participants reported increased enjoyment and immersion when there was haptic feedback, and the researchers validated the device by observing similar discrimination thresholds with physical and virtual objects. Whilst the test stand limits the range of motion, and its potential applicability to widespread commercial applications, the potential for industrial and other training scenarios is what caught our eye.
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