GR/M85692
and
GR/M86200/01
Principal Investigator: Mel Slater
Visiting Research Fellow: David Mizell
The Boeing Company, Seattle, USA.
Research Assistant: Bernard Spanlang
Department of Computer Science
University College London
This set of web pages describes the results of two experiments that were carried out in the summers of 1999 and 2000. The research was sponsored as a Visiting Research Fellowship of Dr David Mizell from the Boeing Company in Seattle USA.
The overall aim of this project is to gain a better understanding of the utility of immersive virtual environments in comparison with traditional screen based displays for the purpose of complex geometric visualisation. This is to be achieved by an experiment where the subjects physically demonstrate their understanding of a complex structure by trying to make a real one based on display of a virtual model of one. The experiment is to be conducted by Dr D. Mizell, proposed visiting research fellow July-September, 1999, and the applicant M. Slater. Two experiments were carried out. The first suggested that performance was actually better on the workstation display rather than in a head-mounted display. However, the results were not clear, because the resolution of the workstation display was far superior to that of the head-mounted display, and also there was a problem of nausea generated by HMD. A further point of interest was that the models that were displayed for copying were small. We therefore carried out a further experiment during summer 2000, which avoided the problem of resolution by all subjects carrying out the experimental conditions in the UCL CAVE. We varied whether or not there was stereo or mono display, the type of tracking, and the size of the objects to be copied (small or larger than body size). Head-tracked immersive VR was shown to have a statistically significant advantage over joystick-controlled display modes, especially in the case where the displayed sculpture was shown in super-scale, surrounding the subject.