Related papers: Second Life Physics: Virtual, real, or surreal?
We describe the work of the Meta-Institute for Computational Astrophysics (MICA), the first professional scientific organization based in virtual worlds. MICA was an experiment in the use of this technology for science and scholarship,…
The ubiquitous nature of modern Information Retrieval and Virtual World give rise to new realities. To what extent are these "realities" real? Which "physics" should be applied to quantitatively describe them? In this essay I dwell on few…
In the present study we attempt to incorporate the philosophical dialogue about physical reality into the instructional process of quantum mechanics. Taking into account that both scientific realism and constructivism represent, on the…
This paper presents an innovative pseudo-haptic model for weight simulation in virtual reality (VR) environments. By integrating visual feedback with voluntary exerted force through a passive haptic glove, the model creates haptic illusions…
We have witnessed remarkable advances in LLM reasoning capabilities with the advent of DeepSeek-R1. However, much of this progress has been fueled by the abundance of internet question-answer (QA) pairs, a major bottleneck going forward,…
According to the Church-Turing Thesis (CTT), effective formal behaviours can be simulated by Turing machines; this has naturally led to speculation that physical systems can also be simulated computationally. But is this wider claim true,…
The physics community explores and explains the physical world through a blend of theoretical and experimental studies. The future of physics as a discipline depends on training of students in both the theoretical and experimental aspects…
We present a comparative study of building with LEGO in three environments: the physical world, a Virtual Reality (VR) counterpart, and a VR setting enhanced with "superpowers". The study aims to understand how traditional creative hands-on…
Real Time Relativity is a computer program that allows the user to fly through a virtual world governed by relativistic physics. The user controls a 'rocket' carrying a 'camera'. The rocket may be accelerated and steered, and the camera may…
Safety is a critical component of autonomous systems and remains a challenge for learning-based policies to be utilized in the real world. In particular, policies learned using reinforcement learning often fail to generalize to novel…
What is after presence? Spatial presence, the sense of "being there", is becoming less of a primary objective and more of a baseline expectation of virtual reality. More than six decades after its invention, VR is shifting from a technical…
Reinforcement learning (RL) has proven its worth in a series of artificial domains, and is beginning to show some successes in real-world scenarios. However, much of the research advances in RL are hard to leverage in real-world systems due…
Fundamental concepts of thermodynamics rely on abstract physical quantities such as energy, heat and entropy, which play an important role in the process of interpreting thermal phenomena and statistical mechanics. However, these quantities…
The rapid development of technology has introduced new formats of human-computer interaction, which have in turn produced many new forms of media and a whole new field of interactive multimedia. One of the major mediums that has grown in…
A program was recently initiated to bridge the gap between the Planck scale physics described by loop quantum gravity and the familiar low energy world. We illustrate the conceptual problems and their solutions through a toy model: quantum…
Video generators are increasingly evaluated as potential world models, which requires them to encode and understand physical laws. We investigate their representation of a fundamental law: gravity. Out-of-the-box video generators…
Reinforcement Learning (RL) has achieved tremendous success in many complex decision-making tasks. However, safety concerns are raised during deploying RL in real-world applications, leading to a growing demand for safe RL algorithms, such…
Multiphysics phenomena, the coupling effects involving different aspects of physics laws, are pervasive in the real world and can often be encountered when performing everyday household tasks. Intelligent agents which seek to assist or…
While safe reinforcement learning (RL) holds great promise for many practical applications like robotics or autonomous cars, current approaches require specifying constraints in mathematical form. Such specifications demand domain…
We investigated students' use of Newton's second law in mechanics and electromagnetism contexts by interviewing students in a two-semester calculus-based physics course. We observed that students' responses are consistent with three mental…