Browsing by Author "Sowndararajan, Ajith"
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- The Effects of Higher Levels of Immersion on Procedure Memorization Performance and Implications for Educational Virtual EnvironmentsRagan, 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.
- Quantifying the Benefits of Immersion for Procedural TrainingSowndararajan, Ajith (Virginia Tech, 2008-07-01)Training is one of the most important and widely-used applications of immersive Virtual Reality (VR). Research has shown that Immersive Virtual Environments (IVEs) are beneficial for training motor activities and spatial activities, but it is unclear whether immersive VEs are beneficial for purely mental activities, such as memorizing a procedure. In this thesis, we present two experiments to identify benefits of immersion for a procedural training process. The first experiment is a between-subjects experiment comparing two levels of immersion in a procedural training task. For the higher level of immersion, we used a large L-shaped projection display. We used a typical laptop display for the lower level of immersion. We asked participants to memorize two procedures: one simple and the other complex. We found that the higher level of immersion resulted in significantly faster task performance and reduced error for the complex procedure. As result of the first experiment we performed a controlled second experiment. We compared two within-subjects variables namely environment and location under various treatments formed by combination of three between-subject variables namely Software Field Of View (SFOV), Physical FOV, Field Of Regard (FOR). We found that SFOV is the most essential component for learning a procedure efficiently using IVEs. We hypothesize that the higher level of immersion helped users to memorize the complex procedure by providing enhanced spatial cues, leading to the development of an accurate mental map that could be used as a memory aid.