Collegiate athletics, particularly football, provide tremendous value to schools through branding, revenue, and publicity. As a result, extensive effort is put into recruiting talented students. When recruiting, home games are exceptional tools used to show a school's unique game-day atmosphere. However, this is not a viable option during the offseason or for off-site visits. This paper explores a solution to these challenges by using virtual reality (VR) to recreate the game-day experience. The Virtual Reality Application Center in conjunction with Iowa State University (ISU) athletics, created a VR application mimicking the game-day experience at ISU. This application was displayed using the world's highest resolution six-sided CAVETM, an Oculus Rift DK2 computer-driven head mounted display (HMD) and a Merge VR smart phone-driven HMD. A between-subjects user study compared presence between the different systems and a video control. In total, 82 students participated, indicating their presence using the Witmer and Singer questionnaire. Results revealed that while the CAVETM scored the highest in presence, the Oculus and Merge only experienced a slight drop compared to the CAVETM. This result suggests that the mobile ultra-low-cost Merge is a viable alternative to the CAVE TM and Oculus for delivering the game-day experience to ISU recruits.
The authors have been conducting research on cross-modal perception employing sensory integration in which participants perceive tactile sensation from stereoscopic (3D) images. The pseudo-haptic system enables the phenomenon of subtle tactile sensation by spatial and temporal synchronization with 3D images without any physical contact. In this study, a 3D image of an object was presented using a binocular see-through head-mounted display, and participants moved their forearms as if touching the viewed object. Myoelectric potentials were measured during experiencing a subtle tactile sensation by the forearm movements. From the results of the experiment, a decrease of myoelectric potential and extension of movement time were found with increase of intensity of the pseudo-haptic sensation.
In the augmented reality technology, what a viewer sees needs to be augmented by 3D information in accordance with the real object. Thus, we have previously proposed a retinal projection type super multi-view HMD which provides a viewer with natural 3D images. However, the proposed HMD has two problems. One is whether the blurred retinal image of the real 3D object is equal to the superimposed parallax images of the virtual 3D image. The other one is the restricted depth range of 3D images. When the parallax difference is large and corresponding pixels of parallax images do not overlap each other, we cannot use the superimposed parallax images instead of the blurred image. In this paper, we theoretically consider above problems and verify the effectiveness of the super multi-view HMD. By simulation the light intensity distributions of retinal images, we confirmed that the superimposed parallax images was equal to the blurred image. Moreover, from the range of the suitable parallax difference, we verified the depth range of the 3D image by the proposed HMD was more than 113 mm in front of the pupil.