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The goal of this study is to examine the effects of the sense of presence and immersive tendencies on learning outcomes while comparing different media formats (Interactive VR, Non-interactive VR and Video). An experiment was conducted with 36 students that watched a Biology lesson about the human cells. Contrary to expected, the results demonstrate that the Non-interactive VR was the most successful format. Sense of presence and immersive tendencies did not have an effect on learning gain, and the latter was not a critical factor to experience the sense of presence. The findings provide empirical evidence to help understand the influence of these variables on learning in VR.

Virtual Reality is becoming more popular over the years because it allows the user to be the main actor in another environment and interact with it in real time. New interaction methods are being studied, like tangible interfaces, but there is little work done related to small distances when grabbing objects through a virtual environment. This study is important because, in our perspective, interaction in virtual reality will be at arms reach, meaning that the user will interact within very close distances (under 1 m). In this paper, the research team further evaluate distance perception using gender, the presence of avatar and height (fixed or personalised). The sample consisted of 64 participants (32 females and 32 males) evenly distributed between all four conditions (8 males and 8 females for each condition). Results revealed that gender does have an impact on small distance estimation; height does not have an impact on distance estimation; and avatar does make a difference when trying to grab a real object through the virtual environment.

There are still open questions about the effectiveness of Virtual Reality (VR) in Education when compared to conventional learning methods. This paper studies the feasibility of a VR-based learning tool and the possible differences in knowledge retention across a VR learning method and a conventional audio method, when it comes to learning a foreign language. Also, the students’ sense of presence and satisfaction were studied. For such purpose, a user study was conducted and results revealed that while presence and satisfaction were higher in Virtual Reality, the knowledge retention score remains the same across both experimental conditions.

Distance Education (DE) still have some challenges to be considered similar to the face-to-face mode of instruction regarding the quality of learning, including the lack in promoting the sense of presence. This research investigates whether a differentiated media support, complementary to the traditional Virtual Learning Environment (VLE), composed by the integration of 3D Virtual Worlds (3DVW) and Conversational Agents, in the role of a Virtual Companions, can promote the student’s sense of presence in order to contribute with the learning process in DE. A quasi-experiment pilot study was conducted with 36 students enrolled in the Financial Management discipline from a DE formal course. A 3DVW was developed in the light of the pedagogical model of Experiential Learning, in the form of a role-play simulation. The results reveal that although the students positively evaluated the experience in the 3DVW, it did not stimulate the sense of presence as expected. However, better performance rates were diagnosed for students who had the help of the Virtual Companion.

The current technologic proliferation has originated new paradigms concerning the production and consumption of multimedia content. This paper proposes a multisensory 360 video editor that allows producers to edit such contents with high levels of customization. This authoring tool allows the edition and visualization of 360 video with the novelty of allowing to complement the 360 video with multiple stimuli such as audio, haptics, and olfactory. In addition to this multisensory feature, the authoring tool allows customizing individually each of the stimuli to provide an optimal multisensory user experience.

In this paper an accessible Web application that uses icons instead of text to performed YouTube video search, called SAMi, is presented. With this iconic interaction Web application (SAMi), we aimed to develop universal access on the Web, by presenting an alternative way of Web search (without using text); to be a starting point for the definition of an accessible interaction metaphor, based on universal design iconography for digital environments; and ultimately, to contribute to the democratization of access to the Web for all users, regardless of the degree of literacy. The main results obtained with the user test evaluation were: first-rate performance, higher satisfaction and total autonomy in their interaction with SAMi.

Proportional, integral and derivative controller tuning can be a complex problem. There are a significant number of tuning methods for this type of controllers. However, most of these methods are based on a single performance criterion, providing a unique solution representing a certain controller parameters combination. Thus, a broader perspective considering other possible optimal or near optimal solutions regarding alternative or complementary design criteria is not obtained. Tuning PID controllers is addressed in this paper as a many-objective optimization problem. A Multi-Objective Particle Swarm Optimization algorithm is deployed to tune PID controllers considering five design criteria optimized at the same time. Simulation results are presented for a set of four well known plants.

The performance of multi-objective evolutionary algorithms (MOEA) is severely deteriorated when applied to many-objective problems. For Pareto dominance based techniques, available information about optimal solutions can be used to improve their performance. This is the case of corner solutions. This work considers the behaviour of three multi-objective algorithms (NSGA-II, SMPSO and GDE3) when corner solutions are inserted into the population at different evolutionary stages. Corner solutions are found using specific algorithms. Preliminary results are presented concerning the behaviour of the aforementioned algorithms in five benchmark problems (DTLZ1-5).