Volume 21, Issue 3

Will there only be one Metaverse in the future? Since October 2021, many virtual worlds suddenly called themselves “Metaverse”, but is that justified? What is the meaning behind the pervasive term Metaverse? How can it be approached from a pragmatic and research-oriented point of view, and maybe separated a bit from pure marketing? This paper tries to contextualise the term and thereby offer an orientation for readers from different industries. Based on a review of past and present activities, we will propose our own definition of the term Metaverse. This is applied to analyse different application scenarios before the paper continues with a general discussion. In a direct comparison, we will tabulate some worlds that already call themselves a Metaverse and check them against criteria from our own definition. In conclusion, we present relevant focal points for a potential future Metaverse resulting from this comparison.

Meeting friends to go shopping, visit a concert or do some sports together – all this and more is now “virtually” possible in the Metaverse. Currently, the creative industries have made the most of the potential of virtual worlds. But the metaverse has no limits. The newly created dynamics raise the question of the extent to which the manufacturing industry can benefit from the potential of these virtual worlds. So far, augmented reality (AR) has been recognized as being useful to the manufacturing industry. The combination of virtual reality (VR) and augmented reality (AR) now unleashes new opportunities for industrial companies. For example, by making a virtual inspection of unmanned facilities possible. A project which has been put into practice by the Entsorgungsverband Saar (EVS) in cooperation with the August-Wilhelm Scheer Institute.

Physical well-being depends essentially on how the own body is perceived. A missing correspondence between the perception of one’s own body and reality can be distressing and eventually lead to mental illness. The touch of the own body is a multi-sensory experience to strengthen the feeling of the own body. We have developed an interaction technique that allows the self-touch of the own body in an immersive environment to support therapy procedures. Through additional visual feedback, we want to strengthen the feeling for the own body to achieve a sustainable effect in the own body perception. We conducted an expert evaluation to analyse the potential impact of our application and to localize and fix possible usability problems. The experts noted the ease of understanding and suitability of the interaction technique for increasing body awareness. However, the technical challenges such as stable and accurate body tracking were also mentioned. In addition, new ideas were given that would further support body awareness.

Examining peoples’ affect and emotions over time and their effects on peoples’ behavior are ongoing endeavors in human-computer-interaction (HCI) research. This paper reports an experiment in which participants watched either positive or negative film clips on a tablet PC to enter a positive or negative affective state. Successively, they accomplished four basic system interaction tasks like changing fonts of an app on the same device. Results show that, in line with previous studies, peoples’ general valence ratings quickly reverted to neutral when starting the task accomplishment. At the level of distinct positive emotions, participants’ ratings of hope, joy, and serenity decreased after watching negative film clips. Moreover, amusement, love, and serenity decreased during the interaction with the tablet PC. Amongst the negative emotions, only ratings of sadness increased after watching negative film clips and decreased again after the interaction. Also, participants in the positive film group were slower in executing one of the basic tasks than participants in the negative film group. The findings suggest that only few emotions may be causal for peoples’ ratings of general affect. Results also indicate that negative emotions may help people executing standard tasks, in contrast to positive emotions. Implications for HCI design and research are discussed.

Nowadays, most information and communication technologies target literate users and neglect the 800 million illiterate individuals around the world. Although there have been several attempts to develop systems that help illiterate people and try to reduce the digital gap between them and those who are literate, it is still challenging to find accessible systems for illiterate people. This research aims to reduce the digital gap between illiterate and literate people in Iraq through developing a mobile application for learning traffic signs. Firstly, a requirement elicitation study was conducted to explore a set of design considerations and build an accessible interface for illiterate people. The study resulted in several design principles, such as using voice instructions, focusing on graphic content, and using the local language. Then, the mobile application was developed based on these design principles. Finally, an evaluation study was conducted to measure the usability of the developed application. The results revealed that the built application is efficient and effective, and the users were extremely satisfied in several aspects, such as easy usage and learnability, and declared that they would use it in the future and recommend it to others.