Effects of Display Type on Performance in Virtual Environments.
Abstract
This research was conducted as part of a program to determine interface requirements for enabling dismounted soldiers to train in Virtual Environments (VEs). We compared different VE display devices in terms of their effects on task performance, skill acquisition, and side effects. Forty-eight college students completed a series of visual and psychomotor tasks, a subset of the Virtual Environment Performance Assessment Battery (VEPAB), using either a Head-mounted Display (HMD), a head-tracked boom-mounted display, or a standard computer monitor. Performance on vision tasks was sensitive to differences in display devices and to individual differences. Visual acuity scores were ordered according to estimates of the resolution of the displays, but were worse than what would he predicted from the resolution estimates. In comparison to real-world performance, distance and height estimation in the VEs varied greatly across participants, especially with the HMD. Motor tasks had high reliability, demonstrated small but significant practice effects, and were correlated with participants' use of computers and video games. Unexpectedly, even the standard monitor group showed a significant increase in simulator sickness scores. The VEPAB tasks should prove useful in the future when design tradeoffs must be made in the process of developing training system prototypes.
Document Details
- Document Type
- Technical Report
- Publication Date
- Oct 01, 1996
- Accession Number
- ADA322046
Entities
People
- Daniel P. Mcdonald
- Donald Ralph Lampton
- Eugenia M. Kolasinski
- John P. Gildea
Organizations
- U.S. Army Research Institute for the Behavioral and Social Sciences