Change of Plans

I have weekly meetings with my research professor, Dr. Bobby Bodenheimer, and recently we have been discussing a change in direction for my research project. While I still believe that dyadic interaction and its effects on learning in a virtual environment is extremely important to the advacement of virtual reality, I also believe that the way in which humans interact with the environment is important and, at least for me, more interesting.

The user interface for an immersive VE is very naturalistic, a user simply puts on a head-mounted display (HMD) and can begin to use the environment right away. Using the environment can mean slightly different things for various environments, however for the most part this means locomoting through the space by walking or with the aid of a joystick and observing the environment. This describes a very passive role within the environment, with little ability to manipulate the space or take an active role in interacting with the objects that may surround the user.

I have mentioned some of my past research in previous posts, and while much of it related to learning in the virtual world, both of my past research projects also involved object interaction within a VE. One experiment had the user throwing a ball that was co-located with its physical counterpart and the other experiment involved a stamp tool and a board which this stamp tool could be fit into. These simple examples of object interaction presented many problems of their own, for example making sure that the virtual and physical representations were oriented in the exact same way and that the tracked physical object was never lost by our tracing system, therefore causing the virtual representation to disappear in the VE. Other problems present themselves once we move away from small and simple object interactions and move into spaces which are larger than the physical tracking space and have many objects. It becomes impossible to provide physical representations for all of the objects in a virtual space. An intuitive interface which allows us to manipulate these objects must therefore be developed, and I hope to expand on this topic with the time I have left here at Vanderbilt.