University of Southern California

Sensory Environments Evaluation

The Sensory Environments Evaluation (SEE) project develops methodologies for creating and utilizing multimodal, emotionally affective virtual environments to provide more effective training. Effective training means training that results in a high degree of initial learning and subsequent retention of the lessons learned. Retention is particularly important for military training because lessons learned often fade over time requiring expensive retraining. Humans remember events longer if they have an emotional connection to the event. The SEE project capitalizes on this fact by eliciting degrees of emotional responses from participants during a scenario using integrated sensory cues (visual, aural, haptic and olfactory) combined with current findings from the neurobiological, cognitive and psychological fields. Rather than a focus on photo-realism, this methodology of emotional connection results in a simulation that elicits the gestalt sense that it "feels real." SEE's ongoing evaluation studies test the effectiveness of the sensory modalities and the emotional response of participants through physiological monitoring. Analysis of data to date has shown that high arousal states in the virtual environment equate to increased retention, and that participants with high first person shooter (FPS) game skills may need enhanced stimulation to achieve the same amount of arousal/retention as non-FPS game players.

This project differs from others in the following ways:

  • It utilizes an integrated sensory design approach toward emotional involvement.
  • It designed and implemented a custom "Scent Collar" for delivery of smells within the virtual environment.
  • It implements qualitative and quantitative evaluations on the effectiveness of these techniques on recall and retention.
  • It developed an integrated tool set to evaluate multivariate, free-agency immersive environments.
  • It investigates the effect of subject game-play characteristics on immersive training environments.

Tags: emotional, environment, multimodal, senses, virtual

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Goals

  • Create methodologies for enhanced affective simulation content, using integrated sensory stimuli along with findings from neurological, cognitive and psychological emotions research, to create scenarios that are perceived as more engaging and therefore more memorable
  • Improve the quality of immersive training simulations through these techniques for increased retention of lessons learned in training environments
  • Evaluate the effectiveness of these techniques
  • Create new tools to support evaluations of large multivariate, free-agency training environments
  • Investigate how modern video game play relates to immersive training simulations

See Also: http://projects.ict.usc.edu/see/