Facing the challenges of fully immersive virtual and augmented reality for simulation and training

Immersive Virtual Environments are extremely powerful tools; they allow to build worlds whose only limit is the imagination. They are not only useful to artists letting their creativity run wild, but they can also have a tremendous impact on several everyday activities. Using IVEs we could meet a friend living far away as we’re located in the same room, we could relax during our break by swimming with the whales or visiting ancient ruins on the other side of the world or we could practice a dangerous work procedure in a totally controlled and safe environment. This work will try to give an overview of the technological challenges faced when developing fully immersive virtual environments, presenting the state-ofthe-art of the enabling technologies. The first part of the thesis presents the solutions adopted to face some of these challenges faced encountered during the development of fully immersive VEs of different types—namely Virtual Reality, Augmented Reality and Mixed Reality systems—exploiting different technologies. In the second part of this work, we will try to evaluate the impact of these technologies on different application fields. An investigation on the use of IVEs as training tools in industrial contexts is conducted. Finally we will explore the effects that IVEs technologies could produce on our social life and social behaviour, and vice versa, how our social habits influence the way we use new technologies and what are the user’s expectations.