Virtual Reality Evolution in Brazil: A Survey over the Papers in the "Symposium on Virtual and Augmented Reality"

Virtual Reality 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 language, international participants, areas and sub-areas of application and related technologies. Although oversees participants has proven not constant, papers published in English has proven stable to SVR editions. The study also 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 low-level programming languages and frameworks preferences. The number of Augmented Reality papers has grown steadily and a great variety of underlying knowledge fields (such as 3D interaction and real-time simulation) are persistent topics of interest. An expected shift from VRML to other 3D Web technologies have already happened but there are just a few research papers devoted to formulative, evaluative or descriptive approaches. Data show that by improving the research budget to the area could impact productivity, a centralized database of publications would facilitate recovering and analyzing past contributions and, that enforcing more scientifically rigorous and English-written papers could raise the quality and visibility of Brazilians´ research in VR.