Miguel Melo

Institute for Systems and Computer Engineering, Technology and Science (INESC TEC) | INESC TEC · CSIG – Centre for Information Systems and Computer Graphics

Since high dynamic range (HDR) displays are not yet widely available, there is still a need to perform a dynamic range reduction of HDR content to reproduce it properly on standard dynamic range (SDR) displays. The most common techniques for performing this reduction are termed tone-mapping operators (TMOs). Although mobile devices are becoming wid...

Tone mapping operators (TMOs) allow the visual appearance of High Dynamic Range (HDR) video to be reproduced on Low Dynamic Range (LDR) displays. While several studies have been made to compare the performance of different TMOs on standard displays, there is only one preliminary study that takes into account the characteristics of Small Screen Devi...

This paper presents an evaluation of high-dynamic-range (HDR) video tone mapping on a small screen device (SSD) under reflections. Reflections are common on mobile devices as these devices are predominantly used on the go. With this evaluation, we study the impact of reflections on the screen and how different HDR video tone mapping operators (TMOs...

Purpose-This study investigates the barriers to the adoption of Virtual Reality (VR) in the tourism industry. Although VR has great potential to enhance the tourist experience, the adoption of this technology is still limited in the tourism sector. Building on the fundamental principles of the Technology-Organization-Environment (TOE) theory and it...

Virtual Reality (VR) has proven to be an important contribution to tourists' decision-making regarding a destination. This fact can be determinant, especially when tourists face some social limitation or restriction that conditions their participation in tourism activities. Therefore, we aim to understand whether the possibility of experiencing imm...

Training in a virtual environment can augment the current methods of professional’s training, preparing them better for possible situations in the field of work while taking advantage of Virtual Reality (VR) benefits. This paper proposes a cost-effective immersive VR platform designed in real-context usage, consisting of an authoring tool that perm...

With industry evolution and the development of Industry 4.0, manufacturers are trying to leverage it and find a way to increase productivity. Digital Twins (DT) technologies allow them to achieve this objective and revolutionize Product Life-cycle Management as they provide real-time information and insights for companies, allowing real-time produc...

The advantages of Virtual Reality (VR) over traditional training, together with the development of VR technology, have contributed to an increase in the body of literature on training professionals with VR. However, there is a gap in the literature concerning the comparison of training in a Virtual Environment (VE) with the same training in a Real...

Virtual Reality (VR) has the capacity to increase tourists’ responses, compared with other marketing tools. In tourism, it can play a decisive role in its promotion, since it can generate impactful information that will increase the visit intention. However, there are few reviews that focus on VR as a promotional tool in tourism. To overcome this l...

Virtual reality (VR) for training helps minimize risks and costs by allowing more frequent and varied use of experiential training experiences, leading to active and improved learning. However, creating VR training experiences is costly and time-consuming, requiring software development experts. Additionally, current authoring tools are desktop-ori...

Virtual reality and emotions have become inseparable concepts over the past few years, supported by the increasing number of studies relating them. However, these studies' methodologies are often poorly justified or dependent on the authors' subjective definition of emotion and its classification. Moreover, frequently, these studies only consider t...

Purpose This paper aims to generate knowledge of the impact of different virtual reality (VR) set-ups in tourism promotion regarding destination image, place attachment and behavioural intention. Design/methodology/approach The paper presents a comparative study of the impact of different visualisation technologies (video, immersive VR and multise...

Tourism business models have used several technologies in their development, such as Virtual Reality (VR). Previous studies show that VR allows tourism organizations to promote new types of relationships between tourists and destinations, to enhance the appeal and memorability of tourist experiences and to diversify consumption patterns, which coul...

E-commerce is a field that changed how consumers purchase and interact with products. Although, inherent limitations such as the difficulty of testing the products “first-hand” before a purchase can compromise consumers’ trust in online purchases. Virtual Reality (VR) has been investigated as a tool to solve limitations in several fields and how we...

During the health crisis caused by COVID-19, virtual reality (VR) proved to be useful for the tourism industry, allowing this industry to continue working despite the restrictions imposed. However, it remains to be seen if the impact of this sanitary crisis in the tourism industry influenced managers' intention to adopt this technology in the post-...

The expansion of augmented reality across society, its availability in mobile platforms and the novelty character it embodies by appearing in a growing number of areas, have raised new questions related to people’s predisposition to use this technology in their daily life. Acceptance models, which have been updated following technological breakthro...

The sense of presence is an important aspect of virtual reality experiences, being increasingly researched in educational contexts for its potential association with learning outcomes. A panorama of how these investigations have been conducted could help researchers and practitioners to harness this potential and find new directions. A systematic l...

How we perceive and experience the world around us is inherently multisensory. Most of the Virtual Reality (VR) literature is based on the senses of sight and hearing. However, there is a lot of potential for integrating additional stimuli into Virtual Environments (VEs), especially in a training context. Identifying the relevant stimuli for obtain...

This paper investigates the impact of different immersive Virtual Reality (iVR) technological approaches in teaching and learning English as a Foreign Language (EFL). Specifically, this paper explores the passive iVR and interactive iVR in a real authentic learning context as didactic possibilities compared to the conventional method of listening,...

Presence is often used to evaluate Virtual Reality (VR) applications. However, the raw scores are hard to interpret and need to be compared to other data to be meaningful. This paper leverages a database of 1909 responses to the Igroup Presence Questionnaire (IPQ) in different contexts to put forward a scale that qualitatively interprets raw Presen...

Currently, it is standard to use tracked handheld controllers for interaction in immersive virtual reality (VR). However, since VR interactions are becoming more natural with hand tracking, it is important to provide hands-free alternatives for selection and system control tasks. As such, this study aims to provide an exploratory evaluation of the...

O enoturismo permite estabelecer vínculos emocionais com consumidores, melhorando a experiência dos turistas e podendo incentivar posterior revisita. Dada a sua natureza, as tecnologias de Realidade Virtual (RV) podem influenciar a perceção dos utilizadores sobre a experiência turística, pelo que nos propomos compreender se a possibilidade de viven...

Resumo | A Realidade Virtual (RV) pode influenciar a perceção dos utilizadores sobre um determinado local, através de experiências em ambientes imersivos. No contexto do turismo, a utilização desta tecnologia revela-se determinante na promoção de produtos e destinos, por melhorar a perceção do conteúdo turístico e gerar informações impactantes. Con...

Virtual Reality (VR) technologies have been proven valuable in various application fields, ranging from entertainment to more serious purposes such as education and training.

The VR technology allows its users to interact with the digital environment in a more natural way. The work studied how the level of fidelity and interaction of a virtual visit can influence the user's virtual experience and how both complement each other depending on their level during a VR experience.

Virtual reality (VR) is used in different application fields like health, tourism, or training. Most VR applications for these fields have been built from the ground up without any authoring tool to help the process. This systematic review surveys the existing literature on authoring tools for immersive content and critically analyzes its features...

Virtual reality (VR) technologies have been used successfully in tourism marketing. While most conventional VR applications are of an audiovisual nature, the constant evolution of these technologies allows providing enriched multisensory VR content that can further increase the potential of VR applied to the tourism field. To generate insights into...

Virtual Reality (VR) and its capability to replace real stimuli for synthesized ones as if they were real opened several research lines over the years. Many of those consist of trying to validate whether or not VR replicates the same user behaviours seen in reality. In this study, we investigated whether or not product contextualization and gender...

User experience can be affected by the amount and intensity of information presented. Four scenarios were developed to assess the insertion of information elements (chronometer and hint system) and tested with 37 users to find out if they affected the user's sense of presence and symptoms of cybersickness. In order to instruct users and using virtu...

The adoption of immersive virtual experiences (IVEs) opened new research lines where the impact of realism is being studied, allowing developers to focus resources on realism factors proven to improve the user experience the most. We analysed papers that compared different levels of realism and evaluated their impact on user experience. Exploratori...

Virtual Reality (VR) technologies aim at transporting their users to a virtual space. From the different fields of application, cultural heritage is a field with much to explore. A fact is that everyday pieces of cultural heritage are lost, whether due to natural phenomena that can destroy the natural landscapes or cultural traditions that are slow...

The expansion of augmented reality across society, its availability in mobile platforms and the novelty character it embodies by appearing in a growing number of areas have raised new questions related to people’s predisposition to use this technology in their daily life. Acceptance models, which have been updated in accordance with technological b...

The sense of presence is an important aspect of experiences in Virtual Reality (VR), an emerging technology in education. This construct specifically has been increasingly researched in parallel to learning purposes. However, there is not a consensus in the literature on the outcomes of this association. Aiming to outline a panorama in this regard,...

The use of Virtual Reality (VR) technology to train professionals has increased over the years due to its advantages over traditional training. This paper presents a study comparing the effectiveness of a Virtual Environment (VE) and a Real Environment (RE) designed to train firefighters. To measure the effectiveness of the environments, a new meth...

The main goal of this paper is to investigate the effect of different types of self-representations through floating members (hands vs. hands + feet), virtual full body (hands + feet vs. full-body avatar), walking fidelity (static feet, simulated walking, real walking), and number of tracking points used (head + hands, head + hands + feet, head + h...

Immersive technologies, such as virtual reality, could be effective marketing tools for destination marketing, namely in creating place attachment prior experience the destination. Place attachment plays a significant role in behavioural intentions to visit and to recommend a destination. However, place attachment research is relatively new in the...

Virtual reality (VR) potential to isolate users from the real world while producing a rich virtual environment where users act similarly to how they would in reality is still being investigated in several fields. In this work, we investigated the effects of product contextualisation and gender under an immersive VR application where users can explo...

Previous works have shown the great potential of Virtual Reality (VR) in the area of Education. This paper studies if users can learn a second language when using a gamified VR application through an English learning test and how learning influences user satisfaction, sense of presence, cybersickness, and quality of experience through questionnaire...

This paper presents a literature review of the importance of virtual technology for rehabilitation for people with ASD (Autism Spectrum Disorder). ASD is diagnosed as a neurological disability characterized by a range of physical and mental disorders and whose first symptoms appear during early childhood. People with autism deal with issues with so...

This article presents a study on how the level of interaction and fidelity of a virtual environment can affect the quality of the real estate experience when using an HMD to visit a property. Using a 3D model to represent the apartment, the four versions of the virtual space were elevated, with both the level of interaction and the level of fidelit...

The use of technology in cultural heritage sites for end-users, like virtual audio-visual reconstructions, has become a common solution to improve the communication and perception between these spaces and their visitors. Since humans perceive the world with different senses and in real-time, to evoke more than one or two senses at a time can bring...

Virtual Reality technologies are evolving at a fast pace. It is important to establish if these novel solutions met the goals they were developed for (i. e., to evaluate if they are effective). These technological-based products, whether based on a conventional PC setup or an immersive virtual reality setup, predominantly rely on the stimulation of...

Proper evaluation of realism in immersive virtual experiences is crucial to ensure optimisation of resources. This way, we can take better decisions while designing realistic immersive experiences, prioritising factors that have a higher impact on the perceived realism of the virtual experience. This systematic review aims to provide readers with a...

This paper aims to explore the impact of sense of presence and cybersickness on the users’ expectancy and perceived similarity between virtual and the corresponding real environments. Two virtual reality setups were tested (non-immersive and immersive) to achieve further conclusions. This research encompassed a quantitative analysis using data coll...

This publication is based upon work from COST Action ‘Language in the Human-Machine Era’, supported by COST (European Cooperation in Science and Technology). Authors of the report: Sayers, Dave • 0000-0003-1124-7132 Sousa-Silva, Rui • 0000-0002-5249-0617 Höhn, Sviatlana • 0000-0003-0646-3738 Ahmedi, Lule • 0000-0003-0384-6952 Allkivi-Metsoja, Kais...

Virtual reality has shown to have great potential as an educational tool when it comes to new learning methods. With the growth and dissemination of this technology, there is a massive opportunity for teachers to add this technology to their methods of teaching a second/foreign language, since students keep showing a growing interest in new technol...

Hands are the most important tool to interact with virtual environments, and they should be available to perform the most critical tasks. For example, a surgeon in VR should keep his/her hands on the instruments and be able to do secondary tasks without performing a disruptive event to the operative task. In this common scenario, one can observe th...

The main goal of this systematic review is to synthesize existing evidence on the use of immersive virtual reality (IVR) to train professionals as well as to identify the main gaps and challenges that still remain and need to be addressed by future research. Following a comprehensive search, 66 documents were identified, assessed for relevance, and...

Segundo a Organização Mundial do Turismo, em 2019 registou-se um número total de 1.4 mil milhões de turistas internacionais, que representaram um volume de negócios ligado ao sector de cerca de 1 426 mil milhões de euros. Sendo que a indústria do turismo envolve diversos atores, desde os próprios turistas passando pelos operadores turísticos até as...

Immersion is a proven method of learning a foreign language and using Virtual Reality to achieve that immersion has high potential educational benefits. However, there are no recent systematic reviews that combine both foreign language education and immersive Virtual Reality. This systematic review aims to identify features, educational methods, te...

Enhancing tourist visits to cultural heritage sites by making use of mobile augmented reality has been a tendency in the last few years, presenting mainly audiovisual experiences. However, these explorations using only visuals and sounds, or narratives, do not allow users to be presented with, for example, a particular smell that can be important t...

The goal for a virtual reality (VR) training system is to enable trainees to acquire all the knowledge they need to perform effectively in a real environment. Such a system should provide an experience so authentic that no further real-world training is necessary, meaning that it is sufficient to train in VR. We evaluate the impact of a haptic ther...

Virtual Reality could be useful for heritage management and preservation by complementing or, even, by replacing the ‘real’ visitation to more threatened destinations. The objective of this study was to empirically test the level of similarity perceived by a group of students between VR experience and the ‘real’ visit in a UNESCO World Heritage Cul...

Little is known about the impact of the addition of each stimulus in multisensory augmented reality experiences in cultural heritage contexts. This paper investigates the impact of different sensory conditions on a user’s sense of presence, enjoyment, knowledge about the cultural site, and value of the experience. Five different multisensory condit...

O ano de 2020 apresentou-nos novosdesafios que nunca pensaríamos atravessar.Nomeadamente, uma epidemia global devidoao novo coronavívurs CoViD-19 que impôso isolamento social a uma grande partedo mundo, senão a todo o mundo mesmo.Sendo que o ser humano é, por natureza, umser social e que a sua interação como o meioe com os outros permite-lhe desenv...

Training firefighters using Virtual Reality (VR) technology brings several benefits over traditional training methods including the reduction of costs and risks. The ability of causing the same level of stress as a real situation so that firefighters can learn how to deal with stress was investigated. An experiment aiming to study the influence tha...

Promotional 360∘ videos are now widely used to promote touristic sites, giving consumers a more immersive glimpse of what they can expect from those places. However, these 360∘ videos often comprise so much information that it overloads the users, not allowing them to benefit from such a rich multimedia experience. To overcome this issue, we propos...

Convolution Neural Network (CNN)-based object detection models have achieved unprecedented accuracy in challenging detection tasks. However, existing detection models (detection heads) trained on 8-bits/pixel/channel low dynamic range (LDR) images are unable to detect relevant objects under lighting conditions where a portion of the image is either...

The majority of virtual reality (VR) applications rely on audiovisual stimuli and do not exploit the addition of other sensory cues that could increase the potential of VR. This systematic review surveys the existing literature on multisensory VR and the impact of haptic, olfactory, and taste cues over audiovisual VR. The goal is to identify the ex...

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 demonstrat...

In the original publication, Figs. 1 and 2 were interchange and the citation of Fig. 1 in the third paragraph of section 2.2 Authoring tools for multisensory VR experiences should be removed.

Virtual Reality applications have the goal of transporting their users to a given virtual environment (VE). Thus, Presence is a consensual metric for evaluating the VEs' effectiveness. The present study adapts the Presence Questionnaire (PQ) for the Portuguese-speaking population, maintaining the validity of the contents and concepts, to ascertain...

Dada a evolução significativa das tecnologiasde Realidade Virtual, estas tornaram-seferramentas robustas para diferentes áreasde aplicação que vão muito para além daárea do entretenimento. Uma das áreas ondeesta tecnologia se tem destacado é no treinoe certificação de competências em contextoprofissional.

Training with Virtual Reality (VR) can bring several benefits, such as the reduction of costs and risks. We present an experimental study that aims to evaluate the effectiveness of a Virtual Environment (VE) to train firefighters using an innovative approach based on a Real Environment (RE) exercise. To measure the VE’s effectiveness we used a Pres...

Consuming 360 audiovisual content using a Head-Mounted Display (HMD) has become a standard feature for Immersive Virtual Reality (IVR). However, most applications rely only on visual and auditory feedback whereas other senses are often disregarded. The main goal of this work was to study the effect of tactile and olfactory stimuli on participants’...

Virtual Reality (VR) through head-mounted displays (HMDs) can be delivered via multiple setups such as smartphones, standalone VR or VR Workstations. The VR Workstation setup delivers the best performance of them all; however, as a drawback up until recently, it required cables to power up the VR equipment. The introduction of wireless solutions fo...

Rapidly changing customer demands, regulations and technologies drive the complexity of products, processes and production systems, as well as shorter product and factory lifecycles. In order to handle such complexity while decreasing the time-to-market, immersive virtual reality (VR) technologies are increasingly being used in industry to support...

Virtual Reality (VR) has been evolving over the years, becoming more and more accessible, in a wide area of applications. One of these areas where VR can have a major impact is training and certification. Hydrogen vehicles are becoming a reality and first responders still lack proper tools and resources to train emergency responses for the purpose....

Although selection menus are widely used for interaction, their use on 3D virtual reality applications needs to be objectively assessed. The focus of this study is to evaluate a traditional panel and a radial menu in two distinct virtual environment placements (i.e. fixed on the wall and following the users’ hands). Fifty-one participants used two...

Multiple factors can affect presence in virtual environments, such as the number of human senses engaged in a given experience or the extent to which the virtual experience is credible. The purpose of the present work is to study how the inclusion of credible multisensory stimuli affects the sense of presence, namely, through the use of wind, passi...

With the appearance of innovative virtual reality (VR) technologies, the need to create immersive content arose. Although there are already some non-immersive solutions to address immersive audio-visual content, there are no solutions that allow the creation of immersive multisensory content. This work proposes a novel architecture for a collaborat...

Authoring 360 multisensory videos is a true challenge as the authoring tools available are scarce and restrictive. In this paper, we propose an authoring tool with three different authoring interfaces (desktop, immersive, and tangible interface) for creating multisensory 360 videos with the advantage of having a live preview of the multisensory con...

Virtual Reality (VR) has as a key feature, the users’ interaction with a virtual environment. Depending on the purpose of a given VR application, it can be essential to use multisensory stimulus without biasing users towards specific actions or decisions in the virtual environment (VE). The goal of the present work is to study if the choice of path...

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 stud...

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 foreig...