Simulating Wind and Warmth in Virtual Reality: Conception, Realization and Evaluation for a CAVE Environment

Wind and warmth sensations proved to be able to enhance users' state of presence in Virtual Reality applications. Still, only few projects deal with their detailed effect on the user and general ways of implementing such stimuli. This work tries to fill this gap: After analyzing requirements for hardware and software concerning wind and warmth simulations, a hardware and also a software setup for the application in a CAVE environment is proposed. The setup is evaluated with regard to technical details and requirements, but also - in the form of a pilot study - in view of user experience and presence. Our setup proved to comply with the requirements and leads to satisfactory results. To our knowledge, the low cost simulation system (approx. 2200 Euro) presented here is one of the most extensive, most flexible and best evaluated systems for creating wind and warmth stimuli in CAVE-based VR applications.

Automatic classification of scientific records using the German Subject Heading Authority File (SWD)

The following paper deals with an automatic text classification method which does not require training documents. For this method the German Subject Heading Authority File (SWD), provided by the linked data service of the German National Library is used. Recently the SWD was enriched with notations of the Dewey Decimal Classification (DDC). In consequence it became possible to utilize the subject headings as textual representations for the notations of the DDC. Basically, we we derive the classification of a text from the classification of the words in the text given by the thesaurus. The method was tested by classifying 3826 OAI-Records from 7 different repositories. Mean reciprocal rank and recall were chosen as evaluation measure. Direct comparison to a machine learning method has shown that this method is definitely competitive. Thus we can conclude that the enriched version of the SWD provides high quality information with a broad coverage for classification of German scientific articles.