Browsing by Author "Kopper, Regis"

Now showing 1 - 4 of 4
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    BABES: Brushing+Linking, Attributes, and Blobs Extension to Storyboard
    Judge, Tejinder K.; Kopper, Regis; Ponce, Sean; Silva, Mara G.; North, Christopher L. (Department of Computer Science, Virginia Polytechnic Institute & State University, 2008)
    In this day and age, people not only deal with data but deal with vast amounts of data which needs to be sorted and made sense of. A subset of these people are intelligence analysts who sort through an enormous amount of data that need to be organized to uncover plots and subplots. We are proposing a tool called BABES (Brushing+Linking, Attributes, and Blobs Extension to Storyboard) that will enable the intelligence analyst to sort through data efficiently, uncover plots and subplots using the brushing and linking and attributes features and work with multiple subplots at the same time using the concept of ’blobs’.
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    The Effects of Higher Levels of Immersion on Procedure Memorization Performance and Implications for Educational Virtual Environments
    Ragan, Eric D.; Sowndararajan, Ajith; Kopper, Regis; Bowman, Douglas A. (MIT Press, 2010-12-01)
    Researchers have proposed that immersion could have advantages for tasks involving abstract mental activities, such as conceptual learning; however, there are few empirical results that support this idea. We hypothesized that higher levels of immersion would benefit such tasks if the mental activity could be mapped to objects or locations in a 3D environment. To investigate this hypothesis, we performed an experiment in which participants memorized procedures in a virtual environment and then attempted to recall those procedures. We aimed to understand the effects of three components of immersion on performance. The results demonstrate that a matched software field of view (SFOV), a higher physical field of view (FOV), and a higher field of regard (FOR) all contributed to more effective memorization. The best performance was achieved with a matched SFOV and either a high FOV or a high FOR, or both. In addition, our experiment demonstrated that memorization in a virtual environment could be transferred to the real world. The results suggest that, for procedure memorization tasks, increasing the level of immersion even to moderate levels, such as those found in head mounted displays (HMDs) and display walls, can improve performance significantly compared to lower levels of immersion. Hypothesizing that the performance improvements provided by higher levels of immersion can be attributed to enhanced spatial cues, we discuss the values and limitations of supplementing conceptual information with spatial information in educational VR.
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    A Human Motor Behavior Model for Direct Pointing at a Distance
    Kopper, Regis; Bowman, Douglas A.; Silva, Mara G. (Department of Computer Science, Virginia Polytechnic Institute & State University, 2008-12-01)
    Models of human motor behavior are well known as an aid in the design of user interfaces (UIs). Most current models apply primarily to desktop interaction, but with the development of non-desktop UIs, new types of motor behaviors need to be modeled. Direct Pointing at a Distance is such a motor behavior. A model of direct pointing at a distance would be particularly useful in the comparison of different interaction techniques, because the performance of such techniques is highly dependent on user strategy, making controlled studies difficult to perform. Inspired by Fitts’ law, we studied four possible models and concluded that movement time for a direct pointing task is best described as a function of the angular amplitude of movement and the angular size of the target. Contrary to Fitts’ law, our model shows that the angular size has a much larger effect on movement time than the angular amplitude and that the growth in the difficulty of the tasks is quadratic, rather then linear. We estimated the model’s parameters experimentally with a correlation coefficient of 96%.
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    Increasing the Precision of Distant Pointing for Large High-Resolution Displays
    Kopper, Regis; Silva, Mara G.; McMahan, Ryan Patrick; Bowman, Douglas A. (Department of Computer Science, Virginia Polytechnic Institute & State University, 2008-09-01)
    Distant pointing at large displays allows rapid cursor movements, but can be problematic when high levels of precision are needed, due to natural hand tremor and track-ing jitter. We present two ray-casting-based interaction techniques for large high-resolution displays – Absolute and Relative Mapping (ARM) Ray-casting and Zooming for Enhanced Large Display Acuity (ZELDA) – that ad-dress this precision problem. ZELDA enhances precision by providing a zoom window, which increases target sizes resulting in greater precision and visual acuity. ARM Ray-casting increases user control over the cursor position by allowing the user to activate and deactivate relative map-ping as the need for precise manipulation arises. The results of an empirical study show that both approaches improve performance on high-precision tasks when compared to basic ray-casting. In realistic use, however, performance of the techniques is highly dependent on user strategy.