Heritage education is a key approach to preserving and transmitting a community’s history and culture embedded in its collective memory, fostering social cohesion, and cultivating a sense of identity among different populations. Bridging the gap between historical narratives and contemporary audiences is central to promoting educational outcomes. In recent years, rapid advances in digital technologies have provided unprecedented opportunities for the preservation, inheritance, and dissemination of cultural heritage. Virtual reality (VR), with its ability to create three-dimensional representations of real or imagined locations, provides a compelling sense of realism, illustrating its potential for various applications in cultural heritage preservation, such as 3D historical reconstruction, enhanced tourism engagement, gamified learning, and pedagogical cultural heritage programs. This mini-review focuses on VR-enhanced heritage education, a field that involves transdisciplinary studies on the dynamics of user engagement and virtual experiences tailored for cultural heritage education. The aim of this mini-review is to investigate the current status, identify limitations, and outline prospective design considerations for integrating VR technology into heritage education. In this study, we will provide insights into future design considerations for designers, developers, and educators in order to create better heritage education experiences, contributing to developing interactive approaches to heritage education.

The renovation of old neighborhood plays a pivotal role in augmenting the quality of life and catalyzing urban development. Currently, numerous old neighborhoods in China necessitate renovation due to insufficient maintenance and management, inadequate supporting infrastructure, and suboptimal energy efficiency. Despite extensive research and practical endeavors dedicated to old neighborhood renovation, a research gap in critical analysis emerged during the literature review. This study endeavors a comprehensive analysis to delineate the current state of renovation endeavors, elucidate barriers encountered, and propose innovative strategies to surmount these barriers. Firstly, this study provides a comprehensive overview of ongoing status of renovation efforts and their key focal points. Secondly, this study furnishes an encompassing summary of the fundamental aspects of old neighborhood renovation, encompassing sponge city renovation, environmental enhancement, building energy-efficient renovation, elevator installation, and modernizing elderly facilities and services. Furthermore, this paper meticulously analyzes the barriers such as stakeholder conflicts, resident skepticism, funding limitations, divergent perceptions, limited resident participation, and intricate decision-making processes. To solve these identified barriers, some targeted practical solutions are proposed including bolstering the governmental leadership, exploring diversified funding mechanisms, expanding policy implementation agents, improving resident communication, and establishing collaborative multi-party framework. These measures provide practical guidance to facilitate the seamless progression of renovation initiatives. This study aspires to furnish theoretical insights, practical guidance for policy formulation, and actionable recommendations for sustainable urban neighborhood renovation, contributing to the scholarly discourse and practice in this field.

Robotic surgery, also known as robotic-assisted surgery (RAS), has rapidly evolved during the last decade. RAS systems are developed to assist surgeons to perform complex minimally invasive surgeries, and necessitate augmented interfaces for precise execution of these image-guided procedures. Extended Reality (XR) technologies, augmenting the real-world perception via integrating digital contents, show promise in enhancing RAS efficacy in various studies. Despite multiple reviews on technological and medical aspects, the crucial elements of human-robot interaction (HRI) and user experience (UX) remain underexplored. This review fills this gap by elucidating HRI dynamics within XR-aided RAS systems, emphasizing their impact on UX and overall surgical outcomes. By synthesizing existing literature, this systematic review study identifies challenges and opportunities, paving the way for improved XR-enhanced robotic surgery, ultimately enhancing patient care and surgical performance.