HCC: Design and Evaluation of Spatially Compelling Virtual Environments

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This interdisciplinary project investigates human cognition of spaces to improve virtual environments, both from a user and an author's perspective. The objectives are to (1) improve virtual environments so that better learning can occur in them, and (2) develop authoring methods for virtual environments informed by the cognitive demands that people have when learning spaces. This research project should advance the design and authoring of virtual environments by leveraging human cognitive capabilities. The programs seeks to develop a system to increase the user's sense of presence and sensitivity to the environmental scale of virtual environments. It further seeks to develop locomotion interfaces to assist exploring large virtual environments from within small physical ones. A goal is to employ human-centered representations for locomotion in virtual environments and to develop methods for skill acquisition in virtual environments. This research proposal advances the scientific understanding of human cognition and learning as well. The research proposes studies that will be informative about the broad role that environmental geometry and self-representation play in perception, orientation, and navigation, while controlling factors that are extremely difficult, if not impossible, to control in the real world. A rigorous evaluation program for all components of the project is planned.The importance of this proposal is that virtual environments provide people with opportunities to experience places and situations remote from their actual physical surroundings. Virtual environments allow the simulation of real-world events in a controllable and re-usable environment. They potentially allow people to learn about an environment which, for reasons of time, distance, expense, and safety, would not otherwise be available. Virtual environments could have a huge impact in education, entertainment, medicine, architecture, and training, but they are not widely used because of their expense and delicacy. The research program in this proposal should significantly improve the quality of learning in virtual environments, to reduce the time and cost of authoring virtual environments, and to overcome likely impediments to their widespread use. Moreover, this proposal builds a scientific program to develop a better understanding of the cognitive capabilities of humans in immersive virtual environments, and does so in a way that will inform the design process for such environments and our understanding of how humans reason about space.