Suchergebnisse

Objective: This study investigated potential means of facilitating a return to normal functioning following virtual environment (VE) exposure using a peg-in-hole exercise in recalibrating hand-eye coordination, a targeted gait movement (rail walking) in recalibrating vestibular (i.e., postural) aftereffects, and natural decay. Background: Despite technology advances and considerable efforts focused on the identification and quantification of VE aftereffects, few have addressed means for recuperation, the focus of the current study. Method: After 15 min—60 min of VE exposure and recalibatory exercises, hand-eye coordination and postural stability were assessed electronically, the former via a 3-D measure capturing pointing errors, and the latter by head and body oscillations while standing in the tandem Romberg position. Both measurements were collected immediately after VE exposure and every 15 min up to 1 hr thereafter. Results: Participants (more than 900 college students) who experienced the peg-in-hole readaptation strategy had a significant decrease ( p < 0.000 in pointing errors following the exercise; the other two methods (i.e., rail walking, natural decay) showed no significant change. For posture, all groups showed significant improvement during the 15 minutes after VE exposure, yet none returned to baseline by 1 hr postexposure. Conclusion: Although hand-eye coordination readaptation strategies showed noticeable effects immediately after they were performed, aftereffects were not completely eliminated after 1 hr; hence further research on readaptation strategies is essential to achieve more substantial recalibratory gains in hand-eye coordination and posture. Additionally, hand-eye coordination and vestibular aftereffects may require a period exceeding the VE immersion time in order to recover. Application: These findings may serve as a guide in the development of monitoring policies following VE exposure.

Context. VISTA Variables in the Vía Láctea (VVV) is one of six ESO Public Surveys using the 4 meter Visible and Infrared Survey Telescope for Astronomy (VISTA). The VVV survey covers the Milky Way bulge and an adjacent section of the disk, and one of the principal objectives is to search for new star clusters within previously unreachable obscured parts of the Galaxy. Aims. The primary motivation behind this work is to discover and analyze obscured star clusters in the direction of the inner Galactic disk and bulge. Methods. Regions of the inner disk and bulge covered by the VVV survey were visually inspected using composite JHKS color images to select new cluster candidates on the basis of apparent overdensities. DR1, DR2, CASU, and point spread function photometry of 10 × 10 arcmin fields centered on each candidate cluster were used to construct color–magnitude and color–color diagrams. Follow-up spectroscopy of the brightest members of several cluster candidates was obtained in order to clarify their nature. Results. We report the discovery of 58 new infrared cluster candidates. Fundamental parameters such as age, distance, and metallicity were determined for 20 of the most populous clusters. ; I.N. and A.M. acknowledge support for this work by the Spanish Government Ministerio de Ciencia e Innovación (MICINN) through grant AYA2012-39364-C02-02.