CAREER: Implementing and Assessing Inexpensive, Effective Methods of Exploring Virtual Environments

Rhodes College, Memphis TN

Investigators

Abstract

Virtual environments (VEs) are computer-generated depictions of three-dimensional worlds in which humans can navigate to explore. VEs have been shown to be effective in a wide variety of applications and disciplines such as to train miners on safety procedures, educate doctors and nurses, provide therapy for post-traumatic stress disorder, and treat children with autism. Despite the abundance of research that shows their usefulness, however, VEs are not widely used. This is largely due to the fact that current VE systems remain expensive and complex to operate. However, with recent improvements in the fidelity and accuracy of relatively low-cost consumer-grade sensors and head-mounted displays (HMDs), it is now increasingly possible to create high-fidelity and yet low-cost immersive virtual reality systems. It should now be possible to make VEs useful to the general public to an extent that was not previously attainable. However, significant challenges remain, such as how to give a person a means of moving around and navigating in a VE, especially when the person needs to move in all possible directions including up and down, such as when exploring a virtual model of a molecule or the solar system. Another challenge is to better understand the capabilities and limitations of VEs as general learning environments. This project will make it more feasible to create VE systems that are both high-fidelity and cost-effective, which will make it easier for educators, researchers, workers in many fields, and the general public, to use VEs to improve knowledge and livelihood. The project will make it more practical to use VEs for applications such as to assess the evacuation plans of a building before it is built, provide therapy for post-traumatic stress disorder, or teach children about topics such as molecular biology or planetary phenomena. It has been shown that skills or knowledge acquired in a VE transfers to the real world if the experience closely mimics the real world situation; this project creates a general purpose inexpensive VE in which the perceived experience mimics a similar real world experience as closely as possible, but using cost-effective computer systems. This project take place at a small liberal arts undergraduate college and will offer a number of opportunities for undergraduate student involvement in the research. The research outlined in this proposal enables both undergraduates and researchers to contribute to the body of knowledge in computer science, human-computer interaction, virtual reality, cognitive science, perceptual psychology, and education. The project will expand and extend the frontiers of the foundational science needed to conduct science and solve practical problems using VEs. Specific project activities include: (a) Explore how human spatial orientation in VEs is both similar and different relative to the real world, by conducting a series of user experiments, in different environmental contexts, where the primary experimental condition is VE versus real world. These experiments will fill in a missing gap in the existing knowledge of VE spatial orientation. (b) Develop and evaluate techniques for navigation and exploration within a VE. The project will systematically build and evaluate different navigation methods in both human-scaled virtual environments as well as multi-scale environments. Multi-scale virtual environments encompass virtual models that have no natural human scale, such as a model of a molecule or the entire solar system. The project will systematically evaluate navigation techniques for this type of VE. (c) Evaluate the human perceptual implications of the specific type of VE hardware (motion trackers and visual displays) that are used, specifically by comparing inexpensive commodity hardware and to expensive specialized high-end hardware. The goal is to allow the navigation techniques developed earlier in the project to be implemented on commodity devices. (d) Apply the VE navigation system to an intelligent tutoring system. The project will build a virtual front-end to an existing intelligent tutoring system that covers an entire first-year college biology sequence, and evaluate the extent to which the resulting system permits students to learn biology concepts such as by interacting with 3D DNA molecules in a VE.