Rich Davison

Virtual reality (VR) has increasingly been explored to support mental health interventions, including those informed by Cognitive Behavioural Therapy (CBT). However, many VR-based CBT systems report limited usability evaluation and minimal practitioner involvement, raising questions about their applicability beyond clinical settings. This study aimed to conduct a usability-focused validation of a gamified VR platform translating selected CBT-informed techniques for non-clinical use. Selected CBT techniques were implemented as short VR mini-games guided by a design rationale emphasising simplicity, symbolic interaction, and ease of use. A user study involving 58 university students evaluated usability using the System Usability Scale (SUS), ISO 9241-11-informed usability categories, and brief anxiety-related self-report measures. In addition, three psychological practitioners reviewed the platform and assessed therapeutic coherence and design alignment. Findings demonstrated good overall usability, positive immediate experiential responses, and practitioner support for the platform’s therapeutic coherence and suitability as a supportive digital wellbeing tool. The study demonstrates a structured usability-based validation approach for VR systems translating CBT-informed techniques and offers practical guidance for the design and evaluation of immersive mental health technologies.

Recent breakthroughs in Large Language Models (LLMs) have positioned them as a promising paradigm for agents, with long-term planning and decision-making emerging as core general-purpose capabilities for adapting to diverse scenarios and tasks. Real-time strategy (RTS) games serve as an ideal testbed for evaluating these two capabilities, as their inherent gameplay requires both macro-level strategic planning and micro-level tactical adaptation and action execution. Existing RTS game-based environments either suffer from relatively high computational demands or lack support for textual observations, which has constrained the use of RTS games for LLM evaluation. Motivated by this, we present TowerMind, a novel environment grounded in the tower defense (TD) subgenre of RTS games. TowerMind preserves the key evaluation strengths of RTS games for assessing LLMs, while featuring low computational demands and a multimodal observation space, including pixel-based, textual, and structured game-state representations. In addition, TowerMind supports the evaluation of model hallucination and provides a high degree of customizability. We design five benchmark levels to evaluate several widely used LLMs under different multimodal input settings. The results reveal a clear performance gap between LLMs and human experts across both capability and hallucination dimensions. The experiments further highlight key limitations in LLM behavior, such as inadequate planning validation, a lack of multifinality in decision-making, and inefficient action use. We also evaluate two classic reinforcement learning algorithms: Ape-X DQN and PPO. By offering a lightweight and multimodal design, TowerMind complements the existing RTS game-based environment landscape and introduces a new benchmark for the AI agent field. The source code is publicly available on GitHub(https://github.com/tb6147877/TowerMind).

This paper presents a comprehensive review of motion capture (MoCap) data recovery techniques, with a particular focus on the suitability of artificial intelligence (AI) for addressing missing or corrupted motion data. Existing approaches are classified into three categories: non-data-driven, data-driven (AI-based), and hybrid methods. Within the AI domain, frameworks such as generative adversarial networks (GANs), transformers, and graph neural networks (GNNs) demonstrate strong capabilities in modeling complex spatial–temporal dependencies and achieving accurate motion reconstruction. Compared with traditional methods, AI techniques offer greater adaptability and precision, though they remain limited by high computational costs and dependence on large, high-quality datasets. Hybrid approaches that combine AI models with physics-based or statistical algorithms provide a balance between efficiency, interpretability, and robustness. The review also examines benchmark datasets, including CMU MoCap and Human3.6M, while highlighting the growing role of synthetic and augmented data in improving AI model generalization. Despite notable progress, the absence of standardized evaluation protocols and diverse real-world datasets continues to hinder generalization. Emerging trends point toward real-time AI-driven recovery, multimodal data fusion, and unified performance benchmarks. By integrating traditional, AI-based, and hybrid approaches into a coherent taxonomy, this review provides a unique contribution to the literature. Unlike prior surveys focused on prediction, denoising, pose estimation, or generative modeling, it treats MoCap recovery as a standalone problem. It further synthesizes comparative insights across datasets, evaluation metrics, movement representations, and common failure cases, offering a comprehensive foundation for advancing MoCap recovery research.