A good example is the way certain test subjects are confronted with their fears (in limited amounts) with the use of a V.R. environment, eventually and hopefully overcoming their fear in the process. This technique is called exposure and has been used in the field of psychology for some time, but only since technology is pushing the boundaries between reality and its virtual counterpart closer together and shrinking the no-man's-land between them, it has become more and more interesting for researchers to implement and use V.R. in order to achieve their goals.
Presence
Of course, the V.R. environments and their fidelity to the real world are closely related to how people will perceive them as genuine and 'real', which is extremely important when you want to achieve maximum results. This sense of immersion and realism people are able to feel in V.R. environments is called 'presence' and has become an important measurable unit in the field of V.R. research. After all, a greater feeling of presence will most likely be followed by high fidelity responses from test subjects, eventually leading to more reliable data results.
The past 10 years have been very interesting in the field of V.R. and presence, with multiple angles having been researched, clearly indicating many factors have their impact and influence on a subject's presence in a V.R. environment. With the help of presence as a measurable unit it has been pointed out that the amount of interaction within a V.R. environment has a direct connection with a subject's presence. This so called 'tactical immersion' (Civitarese, 2008) helps with making the virtual world your own and can be as simple as completing several tasks with the V.R. environment.
Other factors
Besides interaction there are also other factors to take into consideration when using V.R.. For example narrative immersion, which can be triggered by an emotional story (Gorini, Capideville, De Leo, Mantovani, & Riva, 2011), or audio (Bonneel, Suied, Viaud-Delmon, & Drettakis, 2008) (Nacke, Grimshaw, & Lindley, 2010), but also the relation between animated human-like 3D models and their human likeness (Tinwell, Grimshaw, Nabi, & Williams, 2010), which in turn explains a lot about the uncanny valley (see picture below).
Last but certainly not least there has been a lot of recent research on a more visual level, regarding presence. Lee & Kim (2008) have pointed out that besides the geometrical quality of 3D objects there is another important factor to take into consideration with V.R.: depth perception. It was this article which gave me the idea to set up my own V.R. environment, putting visual quality along side interaction and see how different setups would influence a subject's presence. My idea is similar to theirs in respect to their 4 different scenarios, where they combine a Low and High version of both visual and interactive factors (see example below).
Out with the old, in with the new
As I said at the beginning of this post I have worked on this project last year, developing a V.R. environment for use with WorldViz's Vizard engine. Unfortunately due to an error in planning (or perhaps miscommunication..) I wasn't able to make use of a special V.R. installation at the University of Nijmegen at the time, forcing me to either wait a few months or rethink the project over. I chose the latter and came up with something much more interesting I think.
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| 2011 VR Setup - Topview |
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| 2011 VR Setup - Perspective |
While my experience within UDK is fairly extensive I will have to battle my way through yet another programming problem though: setting up a specific protocol in order for my own equipment to communicate correctly with UDK's input. During the next couple of months I will keep you updated on my progress and struggles, hopefully giving you some valuable insight in this area. Be sure to come back and most importantly: let me know if you have any problems or solutions in the same field. I'm always happy to help!
