Exploration Of Virtual Environments Research Articles

Acquiring Spatial Knowledge While Traveling Simple and Complex Paths with Immersive and Nonimmersive Interfaces

Exploration of virtual environments may be accomplished with different interface metaphors. Previous research suggests that vestibular and proprioceptive information provided by immersive interfaces facilitates spatial orientation on simple path-integration tasks. We examine whether these interface variables impact performance across paths of variable complexity. Our immersive interface provided all users the ability to conduct the search component of our task more efficiently. Our results, however, show that the immersive interface was no more effective than our nonimmersive one for maintaining orientation. In fact, the immersive interface had a negative impact on performance (absolute error) for individuals who had extensive experience with playing video games. When measured in terms of consistency of response, our results suggest that having extensive game-play experience will negatively impact orientation performance with both interfaces. We speculate that this is due to the conflicting nature of the skills that avid game players acquire in game-play versus those required to perform in our task.

Guided Exploration with Dynamic Potential Fields: the Cubical Path System

Exploring unknown models or scenes is a highly interactive and dynamic process. Systems for automatic presentation of models or scenes either require cinematographic rules, direct human interaction, framesets, or pre‐calculation of paths to a known goal. In this paper we present a system which can deal with rapidly changing user interest in objects of a scene or model as well as with dynamic models and changes of the camera position introduced interactively by the user or through cuts. We describe CubicalPath, a new potential field‐based camera control system that helps with the exploration of virtual environments.

Theatre space as virtual place: audio technology, the reconfigured singing body, and the megamusical

Early popular and theoretical work in popular music studies often bestowed implicit or explicit legitimacy on forms of music cultivating or preserving a ‘live’, ‘unplugged’, ‘acoustic’ and hence ‘authentic’ sound. Over the past fifteen years, much popular music scholarship (Frith 1986; Goodwin 1992; Cutler 1984) has rightly problematised this approach. It is important to note, however, that interpretations of popular music texts or scenes that depict the electrification or digitalisation of sound as uncomplicatedly pro-social or progressive remain problematic themselves. Within popular music production today, few areas exist where these aesthetics of recorded music have failed to penetrate. But there is one sub-field of popular music where the characteristic sounds of recording studio technology are still relatively new. It warrants the attention not only of those engaged in the study of popular music, but also of those involved in the exploration of virtual environments. This sub-field is the contemporary stage musical.

Active versus passive exploration of virtual environments modulates spatial memory in MS patients: a yoked control study

This study investigated whether exploration of computer-generated environments can selectively enhance spatial memory in patients with multiple sclerosis (MS). Fifteen patients and 15 healthy subjects who controlled their movements in a virtual house using a joystick recalled the spatial layout of the environments better than 15 patients and 15 controls who merely watched the active participants' progress. Among passive subjects, only healthy controls did significantly better than active participants in the recall of virtual objects. There were no significant differences between active and passive participants' recall of correct object locations in the virtual environments. MS patients' recall of the spatial layout and of the virtual objects was significantly worse than that of healthy subjects, but patients' data did not correlate with traditional neuropsychological measures of spatial memory. It is suggested that virtual reality can be used in MS patients to assess aspects of spatial memory that are not measured by traditional tests.