Understanding the immersive experience: Examining the influence of visual immersiveness and interactivity on spatial experiences and understanding

Advances in computer graphics have enabled us to generate more compelling 3D virtual environments. 'Immersive experience' in these environments result from a combination of immersion and interactivity. As such, various disciplines have started adopting 3D technology for enhancing spatial understanding and experience. But the impact of the immersive experience on spatial understanding and experience remains unclear. This study utilized a controlled, between-subjects experiment to systematically manipulate a virtual reality system's technology affordances (stereoscopy, field of view, and navigability) and measure their impact. Participants, N=120, explored a virtual office and completed a questionnaire on the experience and tasks evaluating their understanding of the space. The results indicated that visual immersion had the greatest impact on understanding but, better experiences were gained when visual immersion was combined with greater interactivity. These findings support the notion the immersive experience is important for the comprehension of virtual spaces. This study overall served to provide insight into the role of the immersive experience on the comprehension of virtual spaces. The findings advance theories of spatial presence and immersion, support the use of methods which look at technology as affordances rather than entities, and support the use of 3D technology for communicating spatial information as in the case of architecture and fire-fighter training

Human Interpretation of Trade-Off Diagrams in Multi-Objective Problems: Implications for Developing Interactive Decision Support Systems

The growing need for efficient and effective human decision-makers warrants a better understanding of how decision support systems (DSS) guide users to improved decisions. Decision support approaches utilize visual aids to assist decision-making, including trade-off diagrams. These visualizations help comprehension of key trade-offs among decision alternatives. However, little is known about the role of trade-off diagrams in human decision-making and the best way to present them. Here, we discuss an empirical study with two goals: 1) evaluating DSS interactivity and 2) identifying decision-making strategies with trade-off diagrams. We specifically investigate the value of interface interactivity and problem context as users make nine increasingly complex decisions. Our results suggest that problem context and interactivity separately influence ability to navigate trade-off diagrams

Collaborating remotely : an evaluation of immersive capabilities on spatial experiences and team membership

Today’s workforce environments are steadily becoming more distributed across the globe, calling for improved ways of facilitating collaborations at a distance, including geo-collaborations or collaborations at critical locations. Newer technology is allowing distributed teams to move away from traditional conference rooms, taking collaborations into the field and giving remote teams more information about the environment. This idea of situating a remote collaborator’s experiences in the field, virtually, promises to enhance the understanding of geographically remote spaces. Newer technologies in virtual reality (VR) hold promise for providing mobile spatial experiences in real-time, without being tied to fixed hardware, such as systems in conference rooms. An exploratory study using VR technology on remote user experiences in a collaboration was conducted to identify the added value for remote collaborators. The findings suggest immersive capabilities improve feelings of presence in the remote locations and perceptions of being in the remote location increase feelings of team membership

Immersive Place-based Learning - An Extended Research Framework

At Kelvar 2019, we introduced a research framework for immersive virtual field trips (iVFTs) as a key element of immersive place-based learning. Organizing our research in this framework has been highly successful. We will be documenting outcomes of our research guided by this approach here, both as a conceptual extension of the original framework and through discussing three new studies that complement our existing empirical studies aimed at providing an evidence-based basis for assessing immersive learning. We believe in and strongly argue for the necessity of such a framework as we witness for the first time in the history of immersive technologies opportunities for comprehensive studies of immersive place-based learning, given the accessibility of the technology and the growing need for an evidence-based foundation. In detail, to assess the value of immersive experiences for learning, we argue for the necessity to compare them to traditional media such as desktop environments; correspondingly, we extended the framework to include non-sensing media. We conducted several new studies (both submitted and still unpublished work) that fill in gaps such as comparing desktop versus immersive VFTs, comparing Oculus GO versus Quest, and we describe our first experiences with moving immersive learning into the category of advanced iVFTs using both simulations and gamification as potential advantages of immersive technologies. We critically reflect on the results and lay out an agenda for future research on immersive place-based learning

Immersive Learning in the Wild : A Progress Report

Immersive technologies have entered the mainstream. To establish them firmly in educational curricula requires both practical and empirical assessments that ultimately lead to best practice and design recommendations. We report on a study that contributes to both. To enrich geoscience education, we developed an immersive virtual field trip (iVFT) that we evaluated in previous small-scale studies. In order to make it accessible to larger audiences we (a) developed a version of the iVFT for mobile devices (Oculus Go); and (b) used an evolving public VR infrastructure at The Pennsylvania State University. The results of an empirical evaluation are insightful in that they show that system characteristics are only partially predicting learning experiences and that required mainstream adoption, that is, making immersive experiences mandatory for all students in a class, still has its challenges. We discuss the results and future developments