Fabio Solari

Virtual reality (VR) systems aim to create immersive experiences by blending real and virtual worlds. However, accurately perceiving distances in VR remains a challenge due to mismatches between real-world and simulated spatial cues. This study compares the effects of different locomotion methods—teleport, joystick, arms swinging, and real walking—on perceived traveled distance and spatial orientation in VR. An exploratory within-subject user study revealed that while arm swinging was the least preferred method, it yielded the most accurate distance estimations and superior spatial orientation. These findings underscore the importance of locomotion methods in enhancing spatial awareness in VR environments.

Spatial skills, in particular mental rotation, are increasingly linked to STEM achievements and to computational thinking (CT) abilities. Traditional 2D spatial assessments face validity and equity issues from visual ambiguity, occlusion, and missing depth cues, requiring cognitively demanding 2D-to-3D interpretation. These artifacts might contribute to gender disparities, giving males an advantage that may reflect test bias rather than true ability differences. Immersive Virtual Reality (VR) seems to mitigate these issues by providing stereoscopic depth, multi-perspective viewing, realistic lighting, and embodied interaction. We compared spatial performance in VR and traditional 2D assessments using the Virtual Reality Mental Rotation Assessment (VRMRA) in a within-subjects study of 48 adolescents (ages 12-16). VR improved performance, yielding higher accuracy in Mental Rotation Test (MRT)-style tasks (+1.3 items, p < .001), while PSVT:R accuracy did not differ significantly between 2D and VR. We observed that gender effects are task-specific: VR improved the performance of females most in MRT-style tasks, reversing the 2D male advantage, whereas males gained more in PSVT:R-style tasks. Spatial scores correlated positively with CT across both 2D and VR assessments, indicating a link to computational problem-solving. These results suggest that the assessment of spatial skills in VR produces distinct performance patterns with respect to traditional 2D assessment, highlighting the importance of immersive VR for the development of improved tools and its potential implications for inclusive STEM education and talent identification.

Dementia is often accompanied by impairments in social cognition, such as reduced empathy and difficulties in emotion recognition, which negatively impact daily functioning and increase caregiver burden. Early detection of these deficits is crucial, yet traditional assessments relying on paper-and-pencil tests or actor-based stimuli face limitations in scalability and standardization. Advances in digital technologies, particularly high-fidelity digital characters such as MetaHumans, offer a more flexible and ecologically valid alternative. This pilot study compared MetaHuman digital characters with a validated set of human actor videos in an emotion recognition task involving 20 participants. Six basic emotions (Joy, Sadness, Anger, Fear, Surprise, and Disgust) were presented, and performance was evaluated through recognition accuracy, response times, perceived naturalness, and subjective ratings. MetaHumans achieved significantly higher accuracy and comparable response times, although actors were rated slightly more natural. These findings suggest that MetaHumans can provide standardized, reproducible, and cost-effective stimuli for assessing social cognition.

Digital platforms increasingly support collective action initiatives, yet coordinating geographically dispersed users through digital interfaces remains challenging, particularly in threshold settings where success requires critical mass participation. This study investigates how avatar-based social representation in Virtual Reality (VR) influences coordination in threshold collective action problems. Through a randomized controlled experiment with 188 participants organized in 94 pairs, we examine whether brief avatar exposure affects perceived co-presence and coordination outcomes in a two-player threshold public goods game implemented as a real-effort recycling task. We manipulate a single design feature: participants either briefly interact through avatars before the main task (Pre-Task Avatar treatment) or complete an equivalent activity individually without peer visibility (No Pre-Task Avatar treatment). Our findings reveal that minimal avatar exposure significantly increases perceived co-presence and improves strategic coordination, though not through increased contribution quantity. Participants exposed to peer avatars achieve higher social welfare by coordinating to avoid wasteful over-contribution beyond the threshold. Additionally, we identify VR presence-the sense of 'being there' in the virtual environment-as a stronger predictor of task performance than co-presence itself. This research contributes to Information Systems theory by establishing causal pathways from specific design features to presence to coordination outcomes, demonstrates VR as a rigorous experimental methodology for IS research, and provides actionable insights for designing collaborative platforms supporting sustainability initiatives and threshold collective action problems.

Recently, immersive media devices have seen a boost in popularity. However, many problems still remain. Depth perception is a crucial part of how humans behave and interact with their environment. Convergence and accommodation are two physiological mechanisms that provide important depth cues. However, when humans are immersed in virtual environments, they experience a mismatch between these cues. This mismatch causes users to feel discomfort while also hindering their ability to fully perceive object distances. To address the conflict, we have developed a technique that encompasses inverse blurring into immersive media devices. For the inverse blurring, we utilize the classical Wiener deconvolution approach by proposing a novel technique that is applied without the need for an eye-tracker and implemented in a commercial immersive media device. The technique's ability to compensate for the vergence-accommodation conflict was verified through two user studies aimed at reaching and spatial awareness, respectively. The two studies yielded a statistically significant 36% and 48% error reduction in user performance to estimate distances, respectively. Overall, the work done demonstrates how visual stimuli can be modified to allow users to achieve a more natural perception and interaction with the virtual environment.

Visual working memory (VWM) is a cognitive mechanism essential for interacting with the environment and accomplishing ongoing tasks, as it allows fast processing of visual inputs at the expense of the amount of information that can be stored. A better understanding of its functioning would be beneficial to research fields such as simulation and training in immersive Virtual Reality or information visualization and computer graphics. The current work focuses on the design and implementation of a paradigm for evaluating VWM in immersive visualization and of a novel image-based computational model for mimicking the human behavioral data of VWM. We evaluated the VWM at the variation of four conditions: set size, spatial layout, visual angle (VA) subtending stimuli presentation space, and observation time. We adopted a full factorial design and analysed participants’ performances in the change detection experiment. The analysis of hit rates and false alarm rates confirms the existence of a limit of VWM capacity of around 7 ± 2 items, as found in the literature based on the use of 2D videos and images. Only VA and observation time influence performances (p0.88 (p<0.05).