Characteristics and usage patterns of older people in a 3D online multi-user virtual environment

3D online multi-user virtual environments (MUVEs) have a lot of potential in supporting older people in their daily lives, yet little research has been conducted to explore how older people engage with this type of technology. This paper aims to investigate the characteristics, user groups and activity patterns (particularly social networks and gift giving behaviour) of older users within a 3D online multi-user virtual environment. Data from approximately 5000 online user profiles of older and younger users from a 3D MUVE, namely IMVU, was collected for analysis. Overall, we identified several distinct patterns of use (e.g. size of social ties, level of reciprocity, etc.) among older users when compared with younger users. We also found that despite the capabilities of 3D MUVEs to provide the users immersion in alternative realities, a feature well embraced by younger users in this study, older users seemed more interested in activities which serve as an extension to their physical life.     

Overlay Design Methodology for virtual environment design within digital games

Virtual landscapes in digital games have become more expressive and impressive. However, design methodologies that can efficiently implement them have rarely been developed. In real-world landscape architecture, a design methodology called Overlay Design Methodology has been commonly utilized that allows efficient spatial design by computing the hierarchy and the placement of the environmental resources. In this paper, we investigate how to apply Overlay Design Methodology for the creation of virtual environments within digital gaming contexts. Along with the establishment of the design methodology, we measure the effectiveness of the methodology with protocol analysis and survey to 30 game developers. As we observed, the Overlay Design Methodology doubled the collaboration among team members and reduced unnecessary time in the design process by over 98%.     

Human-systems interaction for virtual environment team training

Virtual environments are increasingly used to support collaborative activities and distance learning. However, few are designed to support students, instructors and simulations in multi-participant team training. This paper describes the Training Studio, a system for authoring, delivering and evaluating multi-participant team training in an immersed virtual environment. The Training Studio focuses on human-systems interaction, allowing multiple students to learn and perform team tasks. The Training Studio supports collaborative learning for either single or multi-participant activity. This is accomplished through the use of agents which are assigned to students to act as personal mentors or missing team members. Conducting team training within a virtual environment introduces complexities and issues unique to team training and multiple-participant virtual environments. This paper describes our approach to virtual environment team training, discussing issues confronted and resulting design considerations and implementations.     

Inspiring equal contribution and opportunity in a 3d multi-user virtual environment: Bringing together men gamers and women non-gamers in Second Life

A 3D multi-user virtual environment holds promise to support and enhance student online learning communities due to its ability to promote global synchronous interaction and collaboration, rich multisensory experience and expression, and elaborate design capabilities. Second Life^®, a multi-user virtual environment intended for adult users 18 and older, is the most cited in educational literature, so it is important to explore how college-aged students are using it to form online learning communities. Previous research suggests that there is unbalanced participation between traditional college-aged men and women with regards to 3D multi-user video games, which closely resemble Second Life^®. In this research study, we investigated in what manner women and men college students projected their virtual identities and engaged in interaction in Second Life^®, and how this influenced their learning of course content. Analysis of multiple data sources revealed that conceptions of identity, beliefs of the nature of the virtual world, and technical skill were primary factors which affected group cohesion and learning within the community. Results from this study can provide insight into the class activities that can support all learners in accessing and contributing to the multi-user virtual environment learning community.     

Conditioned suppression in a virtual environment

Virtual environments (VEs) provide an inexpensive way of conducting ecologically valid psychological research. The present study used a VE to demonstrate conditioned suppression, a behavioral model of anxiety, in a first-person perspective video game. During operant training, participants learned to shoot crates to find gold bars and thus score points in the game. Next, during Pavlovian conditioning, a colored light (i.e., conditioned stimulus: CS+) was followed by a white noise unconditioned stimulus (US) while a different colored light (CS−) was not paired with the US. Probe trials in a final testing phase were then used to assess suppression. We found significant suppression of accurate responding (shots hitting the designated targets) during the presence of the CS+ relative to the CS−, both in terms of total hits and hits as a proportion of total shots. Importantly, this effect emerged despite the overall level of operant responding being undiminished during the CS+. Our findings are consistent with related studies examining human behavior in real environments, and demonstrate the potential of VEs in combination with a modestly aversive CS to allow a detailed behavioral profile of anxiety to emerge.     

Mediated enactive experience versus perceived mastery experience: An enhancing mechanism versus a mediator of character attachment and internal political efficacy in serious games

This study aimed to investigate whether mediated enactive mastery experiences provided by a serious game could enhance players’ internal political efficacy (IPE) and further, to examine a path model of how character attachment and pretest IPE might influence perceived mastery experience and posttest IPE. A serious game that incorporates the enactive mastery experience and includes inventories of the measured variables was developed using Adobe Flash and JavaScript. One hundred thirteen college students participated in this study. The results of repeated measure analysis of variance revealed that the participants improved their IPE after playing the game, suggesting that the employed enactive mastery experience is effective. Moreover, results of structural equation modeling suggest that perceived mastery experience is an important mediator of character attachment and posttest IPE as well as a mediator of pretest IPE and posttest IPE. The findings of this study shed light on how to incorporate effective psychological mechanisms to enhance IPE in serious games.     

Tracking precursors of learning analytics over serious game team performance ranking

ABSTRACT

The use of serious games to improve collaborative skill transfer and retention has received considerable attention from scholars, web marketing practitioners and business consultants. Team rankings and learning progress in game learning analytics, however, have yet to be empirically examined. Using fuzzy-set qualitative comparative analysis to study the performance of competing teams in a web marketing serious game (Simbound), we highlight a combination of causal conditions (engagement, reach and profitability) affecting team rankings. This paper proposes a conceptual architecture of the forces that influence learning progress within a collaborative learning environment. This learning environment is studied for web marketing boot camps powered by Simbound at three European universities: Grenoble Alpes University (France), University of Milano-Bicocca (Italy) and Dunarea de Jos University of Galati (Romania). Gaining knowledge of cases through game learning analytics is valuable for two reasons: It emphasises the instructor’s role in mobilising players’ engagement, and it tests variability across cases, offering precursors of team performance rankings. This approach to collective skill retention highlights the moderating factors of team performance rankings, whilst purposely calibrating a gameable learning environment. This paper enriches our knowledge of how active experimentation in learning analytics metrics can develop skills for real business competition.     

A framework for virtual organization creation in a breeding environment

Effectiveness in the process of creating virtual organizations (VO) is an important pre-condition for having a truly dynamic VOs, in response to collaboration opportunities in fast changing market contexts. A realistic approach to materialize agility in VO creation is defined under the assumption of a VO Breeding Environment (VBE), that guarantees the preparedness of its members to quickly get engaged in collaboration processes. After a survey of past approaches and a characterization of the VBE concept, a discussion of the process and suggested functionalities towards a VO creation framework are presented in this context. Finally a list of supporting tools is described and future research challenges are pointed out.     

Generation and Control of Game Virtual Environment

In this paper,we present a framework for the generation and control of an Internet-based 3-dimensionai game virtual environment that allows a character to navigate through the environment.Our framework includes 3-dimensional terrain mesh data processing,a map editor,scene processing,collision processing,and waikthrough control.We also define an environment-specific semantic information editor,which can be applied using specific location obtained from the real world.Users can insert text information related to the characters real position in the real world during navigation in the game virtual environment.     

Cognitive diversity and team performance in a complex multiple task environment

This article examines the multiple effects of cognitive diversity in teams operating complex human-machine-systems. The study employed a PC-based multiple-task environment, called the Cabin Air Management System, which models a process control task in the operational context of a spacecraft's life support system. Two types of cognitive diversity were examined: system understanding and team specialization. System understanding referred to the depth of understanding team members were given during training (low-level procedure-oriented vs. high level knowledge-oriented training). Team specialization referred to the degree to which knowledge about system fault scenarios was distributed between team members (specialized vs. non-specialized). A total of 72 participants took part in the study. After having received 4.5 h of training on an individual basis, participants completed a 1-h experimental session, in which they worked in two-person teams on a series of fault scenarios of varying difficulty. Measures were taken of primary and secondary task performance, system intervention and information sampling strategies, system knowledge, subjective operator state, communication patterns and conflict. The results provided evidence for the benefits of cognitive diversity with regard to system understanding. This manifested itself in better primary task performance and more efficient manual system control. No advantages were found for cognitive diversity with regard to specialization. There was no effect of cognitive diversity on intra-team conflict, with conflict levels generally being very low. The article concludes with a discussion of the implications of the findings for the engineering of cognitive diversity in teams operating complex human-machine-systems.     

混合云环境中多用户数据共享问题研究 *

针对混合云环境多用户数据共享进行了研究,为了完善混合云环境多用户数据共享机制、提高用户存储安全、解决权限撤销延迟问题,此次应用全同态加密算法,并结合门限技术,提出了一个改进的混合云环境多用户数据共享新方案。方案首先对明文进行顺序性分块,之后以改进后的全同态加密算法对明文加密,并发送至混合云存储。方案中为每个共享用户生成等级权限和时间约束信息,实现对共享用户权限管理,同时建立数据完整性标签,验证存储数据的完整性。最后通过实验进行模拟,权限撤销时间小于2s,数据完整性验证中对数据的改变控制在以内,同时访问中增加一个用户只延迟5s。与已有方案相比,表明新方案在实现数据共享的各个方面都获得较好的改善。     

A systematic literature review of empirical evidence on computer games and serious games

This paper examines the literature on computer games and serious games in regard to the potential positive impacts of gaming on users aged 14 years or above, especially with respect to learning, skill enhancement and engagement. Search terms identified 129 papers reporting empirical evidence about the impacts and outcomes of computer games and serious games with respect to learning and engagement and a multidimensional approach to categorizing games was developed. The findings revealed that playing computer games is linked to a range of perceptual, cognitive, behavioural, affective and motivational impacts and outcomes. The most frequently occurring outcomes and impacts were knowledge acquisition/content understanding and affective and motivational outcomes. The range of indicators and measures used in the included papers are discussed, together with methodological limitations and recommendations for further work in this area.     

Interaction with a desktop virtual environment: a 2D view into a 3D world

With the development of computer software and hardware in the past few years, it has been possible to produce effective training virtual environments on everyday personal computers with little expert training required for users or designers. However, the development of the equipment that enables this has brought little coinciding research on what features to include when designing these environments. Despite these increased advances in PC capabilities for desktop virtual environments (VEs), there are still limitations on the number of objects that can be programmed to be interactive, usually due to restrictions on programming time and cost. As a result, it is often left to the programmer to decide which of the objects included to increase the realism of the environment will be interactive and which aesthetic. The work presented in this paper is an experiment that aims to establish a guide for environment designers to aid effective environment interaction development by identifying key elements in a VE design.

Axiomatic design principles in analysing the ergonomics design parameter of a virtual environment

One of the negative side effects experienced by users when interacting with virtual environment is visual symptoms. This paper explores the ergonomics design parameters of the virtual environment to minimize such negative side effect by applying axiomatic design principles. Axiomatic design is a method to provide a systematic way for designing products and large systems. The independence axiom is used to map customer domain (CAs) to functional domain (FRs) and physical domain (DPs). A paper based survey was conducted to identify and define customers' preference in the virtual environment. A virtual robot manufacturing system was developed as a case study to explore ergonomic design parameters that satisfy the independence of FRs and CAs. Results of this study shows that the ergonomic design parameters of virtual environment identified (DP₁₆₁-DP₁₆₂-DP₁₂₁-DP₁₁₁-DP₁₃₁-DP₁₄₁-DP₁₅₁-DP₁₅₂) have satisfied the independence functional requirement and desired visual comfort for users. By uncoupling the design it provides an efficient and effective sequence of design activities FR₁₆₁-FR₁₆₂-FR₁₂₁-FR₁₁₁-FR₁₃₁-FR₁₄₁-FR₁₅₁-FR₁₅₂.     

Evaluating the impact of a cloud-based serious game on obese people

This paper describes the process of monitoring obese people through a cloud-based serious game that promotes them to engage in physical exercises in a playful manner. The monitoring process focuses on obtaining various health and exercise-related parameters of obese during game-play, such as heart rate, weight, step count and calorie burn, which contributes to their weight loss. While the obese are engaged in the game session, therapists/caregivers can access their health data anytime, anywhere and from any device to change the game complexity level and accordingly provide on the spot recommendation. In our study, we evaluate how the different physical activities performed through this game impact their cognitive behavior in terms of attention, relevance, confidence and satisfaction. The evaluation was based on the participation of 150 undergraduate obese and overweight students who were asked to play the game and fill a questionnaire after game-play. The data analysis conducted on their feedback showed that they were self-aware and motivated to play the game for weight loss.     

The Virtual Scylla: an exploration of “serious games”, artificial life and simulation complexity

This paper addresses the integration of artificial life simulations with interactive games-based technologies and describes how the results are being exploited not only for scientific visualisation and education, but also for fundamental research into simulation complexity, focusing on the behavioural representation of species in fragile or long-vanished landscapes and ecosystems. Earlier research is described that supported the development of a virtual recreation of a submerged Mesolithic river valley, discovered during petrochemical surveys of the Southern Basin of the North Sea. Using pollen sample records and vegetation predictions from previous studies, a new alife “engine” was developed that simulated the interaction between “artificialised” vegetation and environmental factors, thus helping researchers to postulate pre-glacial melting migratory and settlement patterns of ancient civilisations from continental Europe to the British Isles. More recently, and to take advantage of the existence of a more accessible and living ecosystem, work has been conducted in collaboration with the UK’s National Marine Aquarium, this time focusing on the Scylla Artificial Reef—a Royal Navy frigate scuttled off the coast of Cornwall in South West England. The resulting “serious games”-based test beds are now providing the foundation for scientific investigations into how models and simulations of marine ecologies behave under different measures of complexity. The exploitation of the artificial life and underwater rendering efforts in others areas, including education and naval training, are also described.     

Full immersive virtual environment CAVE in chemistry education

By comparing two-dimensional (2D) chemical animations designed for computer’s desktop with three-dimensional (3D) chemical animations designed for the full immersive virtual reality environment CAVE^TM we studied how virtual reality environments could raise student’s interest and motivation for learning. By using the 3ds max^TM, we can visualize the chemical phenomena easily and quickly without knowing any special computer language and export the application to files which are compatible with the CAVE^TM (Object or OpenGL files). After the participation in 3D animations at the CAVE^TM students comprehended the molecules’ structure and their changes during a chemical reaction better than during the 2D animations on the computer’s desktop, as the limitations of human vision had been overcome. Furthermore, the students were enthusiastic, as they had the feeling that they were inside the chemical reactions and they were facing the 3D molecules as if they were real objects front of them.     

Real exhibitions in a virtual museum

When creating a virtual environment open to the public a number of challenges have to be addressed. The equipment has to be chosen carefully in order to be be able to withstand hard everyday usage, and the application has not only to be robust and easy to use, but has also to be appealing to the user, etc. The current paper presents findings gathered from the creation of a multi-thematic virtual museum environment to be offered to visitors of real world museums. A number of design and implementation aspects are described along with an experiment designed to evaluate alternative approaches for implementing the navigation in a virtual museum environment. The paper is concluded with insights gained from the development of the virtual museum and portrays future research plans.

Effects of perspective elevation and environmental geometry on representation of a virtual room space

The present study investigated how perspective elevation and room geometry influenced mental representation of spatial layout in virtual rooms. One virtual rectangular and one virtual cylindrical room were constructed. Subjects observed the spatial layout on the floor from five perspectives along the vertical dimension of each virtual room. Then they judged the direction of objects with respect to egocentric and canonical coordinates. The analysis of spatial judgment indicated that judgment accuracy of vertical direction decreased as the perspective elevated, while global situation awareness was best maintained at the 45° elevation angle. The effect of perspective elevation on judgment of horizontal direction was only found in the rectangular room. Moreover, subjects judged the relative direction between objects more quickly in the cylindrical room than in the rectangular room. Applications of these findings to virtual environment design were discussed.     

Evaluating design guidelines for reducing user disorientation in a desktop virtual environment

Navigation in virtual environments can be difficult. One contributing factor is user disorientation. Two major causes of this are the lack of navigation cues in the environment and problems with navigating too close to or through virtual world objects. Previous work has developed guidelines, informed by cinematography conventions, for the construction of virtual environments to aid user comprehension of virtual space to reduce user disorientation. To validate these guidelines, two user studies have been performed where users of a desktop virtual environment are to complete a navigation task in a virtual maze. In an initial study [12], collision detection with the maze walls was not enabled and the results indicated that the guidelines were effective for reducing disorientation but not for developing the users awareness of the environment space. A second study has been performed where collision detection was enabled. Results suggest that the use of the guidelines can help reduce the incidences of user disorientation and aid navigation tasks. However, the guidelines have little impact on users ability to construct cognitive maps of the desktop virtual environment.