A Brief History of Virtual Reality in Brazil: A survey over the publications in the “Symposium on Virtual and Augmented Reality”

Abstract

Virtual Reality (VR) is becoming a mature technology field. To understand its origins and foresee strategies, a study on the last decade of papers published in the Brazilians´ most prominent symposium (the SVR – Symposium on Virtual and Augmented Reality) has been carried out. Papers were classified according to subject of study (including application domains, sub-areas and technologies, among others) as well as
research structure (including authorship counts and geographical distribution, research approaches, among others). The study shows that health related applications have received most of the attention although techniques and tools proposal have raised the most recently which could be related to the lowlevel programming languages and frameworks preferences found to this community. The number of Augmented Reality (AR) papers has grown steadily and a great variety of underlying knowledge fields (such as 3D interaction and real-time simulation) is a persistent aspect of SVR. Data also show that expected shift from VRML to other 3D Web technologies have already happened. Although oversees participation has been not constant, papers published in English has proven stable in SVR editions. Few institutions from Southeast have dominated the research area but another few from Northeast have just surpassed them. Regarding the research, a lack of higher-level maturity research approaches has been noticed. In addition, it was found difficult to assess the relevance of papers to other researches due to poor abstracts and no centralized database of papers. The analysis of 262 papers suggest that (i) by improving the research budget to the area could impact productivity; (ii) a centralized database would facilitate recovering past contributions and; (iii) that enforcing more scientifically rigorous papers with better abstracts and written in English could raise the visibility of Brazilians´ research in VR/AR.