Professional Training in Extended Reality: Challenges and Solutions

About this Research Topic

Background

This Research Topic in the Frontiers in Virtual Reality journal discusses and articulates visions on overcoming the research challenges of using extended reality technologies (VR/AR/MR) for professional training purposes. This special issue will accept research papers in a variety of computer disciplines related to extended reality (XR)-based professional training and content creation to inspire the field to further explore this promising direction.

Professional training is the most common usage of XR in enterprises. For example, Walmart has used VR to train more than 1 million employees. The immersiveness, interactivity, and realism offered by XR-based professional training make it more effective and engaging than traditional flat training media such as instruction manuals and videos, leading to a reduction in training time and a significant improvement in performance. The convenience, safety, scalability, controllability, and low-cost nature of XR-based professional training also make it highly promising as an approach for public service training, fitness training, home-schooling, and
rehabilitation.

XR-based professional training involves training users in an interactive virtual environment or an augmented real-world environment. Leveraging the immersiveness and 3D realism provided by XR, XR-based professional training offers advantages such as high engagement and training
effectiveness compared to alternative, traditional self-training media such as instruction manuals and websites. XR-based professional training experiences have been developed for head-mounted displays (HMD), mobile VR, CAVE systems, etc. With the rapid advancement of consumer-grade XR devices, XR-based professional training has grown tremendously, reaching a wide range of users. For example, XR training experiences for prosthetic training, surgery room training, disaster response training, automotive mechanics training, construction training, manufacturing training, and mine workers training have been explored. While XR-based professional training is promising, a number of technical challenges need to be solved to facilitate its widespread adoption and effective use. This special issue is established to
reinforce efforts to tackle such challenges.

This Research Topic aims to bring together researchers and experts in AR/VR, computer graphics, human-computer interaction, computer vision, robotics, and artificial intelligence to address the research challenges of creating professional training experiences to be delivered via state-of-the-art VR/AR/MR technologies.

Specifically, Research Topic welcomes papers that discuss research challenges and solutions pertaining to the following subtopics:

- 3D content authoring for XR training
- procedural modeling of virtual environments
- affordance analysis and physics-based reasoning of 3D scenes and objects
- cognitive, perceptual and behavioral modeling of virtual humans
- virtual human interaction and human perception
- collaborative and networked virtual training environments
- crowd simulation for VR training
- sound simulation for VR training
- physics simulation for VR training
- serious games in XR
- instructional design and personalization for XR training
- case studies of applying VR/AR to training and education
- haptics for XR training
- other challenges of XR training and their technical solutions

We would currently welcoming abstracts but please be advised that this is an optional deadline, and does not necessarily take the form of the final abstract in your manuscript. We would, however, highly encourage this practice as it allows the Editors to comment on the fit of your manuscript within the Topic.

Please note that a 50% publishing discount is currently in effect, applied automatically to all manuscripts submitted before the end of December 2020.

Keywords: Extended Reality, Professional Training, Challenges, Solutions, Virtual Training Environments

Important note: All contributions to this Research Topic must be within the scope of the section and journal to which they are submitted, as defined in their mission statements. Frontiers reserves the right to guide an out-of-scope manuscript to a more suitable section or journal at any stage of peer review.

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