Kairos: Exploring a Virtual Botanical Garden through Point Clouds

Round 1

Reviewer 1 Report

1. Page 1, references are not cited in numerical order. References [3][4][5] are cited before reference [2].

2. About the participants in the evaluation experiment, only one sentence to introduce: "A total of 22 volunteers (12 in our laboratory, 10 remotely) spent about 4 to 6 minutes exploring the environments in each variant. "  Please supplement more demographics about the participants, and discuss the limitations of the sample and sample size on the results.

3. There are only 23 references, among which many are websites. Please add the latest journal references, and revise the Introduction and Related Work parts in the manuscript.

Author Response

Dear Reviewer 1,

Thank you for your constructive comments and suggestions. We have revised our paper according to them:

1. Page 1, references are not cited in numerical order. References [3][4][5] are cited before reference [2].

Thank you for pointing this out. This was an oversight on our part, for which we apologize. We have corrected the order of the citations.

 

2. About the participants in the evaluation experiment, only one sentence to introduce: "A total of 22 volunteers (12 in our laboratory, 10 remotely) spent about 4 to 6 minutes exploring the environments in each variant. "  Please supplement more demographics about the participants, and discuss the limitations of the sample and sample size on the results.

Thank you for pointing this out. We have provided demographics data regarding the volunteers in section 6.2.1. We report on the age groups, video game experience, and prior experience with the botanical garden.

We start the Discussion section (6.3) with a discussion about the limitations:

"Regarding demographics, although the development of the Kairos experience didn’t have a target group in mind, the age distribution of the volunteers was notably towards younger participants as these groups were more readily available to experiment with the gameplay experience. This was also noted in the fact that more than half of all volunteers described themselves as video-game enthusiasts. Considering the transversal theme regarding nature and memory, it would be interesting to study a group with a more balanced distribution of ages."

We have  expanded this discussion of limitations in section 6.3 with the following text:

"We also acknowledge the limitation of the number of participants in our study. Twenty-two volunteers may not be enough to have a representative account of the user experience. Expanding the number of volunteers would be an interesting future work to have a better understanding of the possible nuances regarding the experience of Kairos."

3. There are only 23 references, among which many are websites. Please add the latest journal references, and revise the Introduction and Related Work parts in the manuscript.

We have revised and added/replaced 9 references with journal/conference references. 

We have revised the citations in the Introduction and also added a paragraph in the Related Work. We have kept the references for the main design and art works of the Related Work because those are the one that most closely relate to our work.

 

Kind regards,

The authors

Reviewer 2 Report

This manuscript reports the design, implementation and evaluation of a point cloud based Virtual Reality Environment for a botanical garden. Its main goal is to convey the ambiance of the Garden, along with showing people its natural processes usually hidden to the naked eye with the aim to rekindle our relationship with nature. And it has a reasonable writing structure and fluent language, but there are still some problems that need to be addressed. Detailed comments are as follows:

 

Section 5.3.1: The root structure is derived from illustrations or text descriptions, so it can be seen that the display of the root structure is not real, so what is the need to visualize the root structure?

 

Section 5.3.3: I think it's necessary to describe the natural process of collecting visible things, but there is no description of how to collect here? It is worth adding the significance of collecting natural processes.

 

Section 6: The evaluation is a very subjective process, and the evaluation population has a great influence on the evaluation results. I think the number of people involved in the evaluation is too small, and almost half of them are people from your lab, and if they have been involved in the construction of the virtual botanical garden, then their perception is not necessarily informative. And almost half of the volunteers are academic workers, should you consider expanding the career distribution of volunteers, or including a description of the profession in the evaluation.

 

Line 451-455: The PC and VR experiences are definitely different, so does the questionnaire design consider both methods?

 

Figure 15(a): The abscissa value is in the wrong position.

 

Author Response

Dear Reviewer 2,

Thank you for your constructive comments and suggestions. We tried to incorporate them in the new revised version:

Section 5.3.1: The root structure is derived from illustrations or text descriptions, so it can be seen that the display of the root structure is not real, so what is the need to visualize the root structure?

Thank you for pointing this out. The reason behind these elements is important to understand the overall experience. We have added the following text to the beginning of section 5.3, to clarify:

"Our intention in representing these natural processes was twofold. On the one hand, to draw the user's attention to hidden or easy to miss processes and relationships between the trees and other biological systems. On the other hand, to incorporate into the interactive experience dynamic elements that could serve as awe- or curiosity-inspiring moments to captivate users. While we did go beyond the available point-cloud data, our focus remained on maintaining visual consistency by keeping elements simple. We believe that by enabling users to observe and engage with nature's processes in a virtual reality setting, we can promote a deeper awareness of the natural world's inner workings and foster a greater appreciation for the environment we aim to represent."

Section 5.3.3: I think it's necessary to describe the natural process of collecting visible things, but there is no description of how to collect here? It is worth adding the significance of collecting natural processes.

We are not sure we completely understood the comment/question. The purpose of this section was to describe the implementation approach to incorporate these elements into the interactive experience. The process of identifying these natural processes was through observation, at the location, during the data capture. 

We considered adding more evidence of these through the photographs we took, but we consider that the document has already a large number of images.

 

Section 6: The evaluation is a very subjective process, and the evaluation population has a great influence on the evaluation results. I think the number of people involved in the evaluation is too small, and almost half of them are people from your lab, and if they have been involved in the construction of the virtual botanical garden, then their perception is not necessarily informative. And almost half of the volunteers are academic workers, should you consider expanding the career distribution of volunteers, or including a description of the profession in the evaluation.

Thank you for this comment. We agree the number of participants could have been larger. We did not collect information about the profession, although about half were students (not from the lab itself, but from the University). None of the participants had any involvement in the botanical garden project. 

When we mention laboratory volunteers in the paper, we are referring to the volunteers that came to our lab to do the study in-person, as opposed to the remote ones. They were not from the lab itself.

 

Line 451-455: The PC and VR experiences are definitely different, so does the questionnaire design consider both methods?

Yes, the questionnaire contained specific items to address this.

Figure 15(a): The abscissa value is in the wrong position.

Thank you for noting this. We have corrected the chart.

 

Kind regards,

The authors

Reviewer 3 Report

Overall, this article is complete and appealing to researchers in the field. But the format could be further improved.

1.      The numerical order of references may be considered to follow their sequence of occurrence.

 

2.      The presentation of Figures can be improved. For example, Figure 6 could be more compact by utilizing the space on the left side of the page; the horizontal axis of Figure 15(a) is missing.

Author Response

Dear Reviewer 3,

Thank you for your constructive comments. We have addressed in the revised version of the paper as follows:

1. The numerical order of references may be considered to follow their sequence of occurrence.

We have corrected this issue, thank you for noting. 

 

2. The presentation of Figures can be improved. For example, Figure 6 could be more compact by utilizing the space on the left side of the page; the horizontal axis of Figure 15(a) is missing.

Thank you for these suggestions. The number of required images to report this work was a challenge. 

Regarding Figure 6, we have tried to use the space on the left part of the page without success. We are not sure how to best to this using the provided LaTeX template. We hope that this can be addressed during the typesetting stage.

Regarding Figure 15(a), we have corrected the issue. Thank you for pointing this out.

 

Kind regards,

The authors