Published reports suggest that males significantly outperform females in navigating virtual environments. A novel navigation technique reported in CHI 2001, when combined with a large display and wide field of view, appeared to reduce that gender bias. That work has been extended with two navigation studies in order to understand the finding under carefully controlled conditions. The first study replicated the finding that a wide field of view coupled with a large display benefits both male and female users and reduces gender bias. The second study suggested that wide fields of view on a large display were useful to females despite a more densely populated virtual world. Implications for design of virtual worlds and large displays are discussed. Specifically, women take a wider field of view to achieve similar virtual environment navigation performance to men.

The field of view (FOV) in most head-mounted displays (HMDs) is no more than 60 degrees wide -- far narrower than our normal FOV of about 200 wide. This mismatch arises mostly from the difficulty and expense of building wide-FOV HMDs. Restricting a person's FOV, however, has been shown in real environments to affect people's behavior and degrade task performance. Previous work in virtual reality too has shown that restricting FOV to 50 or less in an HMD can degrade performance. I conducted experiments with a custom, wide-FOV HMD and found that performance is degraded even at the relatively high FOV of 112, and further at 48. The experiments used a prototype tiled wide-FOV HMD to measure performance in VR at up to 176 total horizontal FOV, and a custom large-area tracking system to establish new findings on performance while walking about a large virtua...

Virtual reality (VR) involves an attempt to create an illusion that the user of the VR system is actually present in a synthetic (usually computer-generated) environment. Little is known about how various system parameters affect the illusion of presence in a virtual environment (VE). In particular, there seem to be very little quantitative data on which to base VR system design decisions. Also, while presence (or immersion) in VEs is a primary goal of VR, not much is known about how this variable affects task performance. The goal of this research was to provide a ratio-scale measure of perceived presence in a VE, to explore the effects of a number of environmental parameters on this measure and construct empirical models of these effects, and to relate perceived presence to user performance. This was done by manipulating eleven independent variables in a series of three experiments. The independent variables manipulated were scene update rate, visual display resolution, field of view, sound, textures, head-tracking, stereopsis, virtual personal risk, number of possible interactions, presence of a second user, and environmental detail. Participants performed a set of five tasks in the VE and rated perceived presence at the end of each set using the technique of freemodulus magnitude estimation. The amount of time spent in the VE was also recorded. The results

INTRODUCTION A head-mounted display (HMD) is a device that uses some sort of helmet or goggles to place a display system on an observer's head directly in front of the eyes. These display systems require a complex integration of electronic, optical, audio and mechanical components. Many of the HMDs commercially available today provide a separate display for each eye, and these systems can be equipped with special optics to focus and stretch the perceived field of view (FOV). Most HMDs also are equipped with stereo headphones for presenting audio information to the user. HMDs are typically used to display virtual environments, which are interactive, computer graphics-based environments. HMDs are also used for teleoperator displays, receiving input from remote cameras, sensors, and effectors generated by telerobotic vehicles and devices. Deciding which HMD is most appropriate for a particular set of requirements can be a difficult task. Display choices are often arduous due to

Many virtual reality researchers consider exact head registration and an exact multi-sensory alignment between real world and virtual objects to be a critical factor for ef-fective motor performance in a virtual environment. Calibration procedures for head-mounted displays, however, can be error prone, time consuming and sometimes im-practical to perform. To better understand the relationship between head registration and fine motor performance, we conducted a series of reciprocal tapping tasks under four conditions: real world tapping, virtual reality with correct head registration, virtual reality with mildly perturbed head registration, and virtual reality with highly perturbed head registration. As might be expected, virtual reality performance was worse than real world performance. There was no effect of head registration perturbation on motor performance in the tapping tasks. We believe that sensorimotor adaptation enabled sub-jects to perform equally well in the three virtual reality conditions despite the incorrect head registration in two of the conditions. This suggests that exact head registration may not be as critically important as previously thought, and that extensive per-user calibration procedures may not be necessary for some virtual reality tasks. ii

Conventional analysis of atmospheric data includes three-dimensional desktopcomputer displays. One disadvantage is that it can reduce the ability to zoom in and see small-scale features while concurrently viewing other faraway features. This research intends to determine if using virtual environments to examine atmospheric data can improve a meteorologist s ability to analyze the given information. In addition to possibly enhancing small-scale analysis, virtual environments technology offers an array of possible improvements. Presented is the theory on developing an experiment to establish the extent to which virtual environments assist meteorologists in analysis. Following is the details of an implementation of such an experiment. Based on the quantitative results obtained, the conclusion is that immersion can significantly increase the accuracy of a meteorologist s analysis of an atmospheric data set.

For the goal of designing a wearable low vision aid, aspects of both head-mounted display (HMD) design and performance evaluation were integrated into a single study of scanning ability. A head-mounted version of a novel retinal light scanning display known as the virtual retinal display was fabricated for this study. A remote head CCD (charge coupled device) attached approximately at the user’s line of sight was used as the input source. Scanning ability was quantified as the time to identify a target in a wide field of distractors while using the HMD design in four different display interface modes (DIMs). Each DIM was tested with respect to their corresponding controls: A (augmented, see-through) and CO (center occluded) DIMs were compared to the augmented control (augmented, retinal display turned off), and CPO (center and periphery occluded) and PO (periphery occluded) DIMs were compared to the periphery occluded control (periphery obstructed, retinal display turned off). Each DIM was tested at high, medium, and low contrast levels. Five subjects were tested without optical correction (visual acuity worse than 20/200), which accurately represented low vision subjects. Results showed that for each DIM, scanning performance decreased as the contrast level decreased. At the We thank Nick Kipping (student in Industrial Design) and Robert Burstein (Research Engineer) for their technical assistance, Duff Hendrickson (Experience Designer) for the computer animations, The National Science Foundation for funding this research (Grants 9801294 & 9978888), the R.E.U. program,