Week 2 summaries
Designing Interactive Theme Park Rides
This paper is all about a game available in a park theme and about choices of design. This game is a simulation of pirate’s battleship and uses 3D screens and 3D sounds to appear as real as possible. But it does not pretend to be a pure realistic software tool (like a flight simulator engine) but more than a place to get fun. Then, some aspects of the reality have been altered.
Offering the feeling of freedom when in fact just controlling and limiting the number of possibilities is one of the biggest challenges in video game, and by extension, of the attraction described. So, how Disney does? By offering reward or prepare traps. Where there are enemy ships, there is the island and as we can imagine, gold. Where there is nothing, magic ships appears behind the user and sneaky engage.
The game is just all about 5 minutes. That duration is long enough to crescendo the action, in the way of starting slowly, then offering a lot of action to finish with a memorable fight, like in any movies. But 5 minutes is not long enough to really let too many possibilities for the user. Because complex commands cannot be learned in such time, Disney had to get the balance between complexity and fun. And the decided to use real feeling, like physical sensation by letting players moving from canon to canon. And that is a feeling you cannot get in your couch playing at home.
Merging Virtual Objects with the Real Word
This paper talks about creating 3D renders using ultrasounds. One a first time, it explains how to get a 3D results and then gives feedback about attempts to display the data.
Basically, an ultrasound scan creates a 2D slices. Those slices have to be combined to create a 3D model. To achieve this purpose, several methods exist. Some of them are briefly presented like grey scale.
For the experimentation, the authors used a hardware composed of an ultrasound scanner, a tracking device and a camera. The tracking device gives the position of each device. The acquisition is:
– the scanner gets ultrasound images,
– in the same time, the camera takes a real word image,
– knowing the position of both of them allows calibration and an image is rendered.
The last part of the article is about improvement or critics.
One issue encounter in the data visualization is the choice between overlaying the 3D model on the subject or create “a box” to help viewer guessing the perspective. In the first case, the subject is hidden while in the other one a part of the data is hidden.
Other issues are more technological. This system is highly sensitive to lag, is limited by the stability of the tracking, and require huge amount of computing resources. Observed in 1992, I am not sure those limits are still relevant.
Virtual Environments for treating the fear of heights
This article talks about using VE as a tool to reduce or minimized acrophobia, the fear of heights. But the main point is not to argue about how VE was used, but how VE is efficient. Indeed, the article starts with technical consideration then describes the three environments build for the therapy: balconies, elevators and bridges. Those choices are neither justified nor commented.
On the other way, the article is more talkative about measurement. The therapy is evaluated by questionnaires. Subjects had to fill a form before and after the therapy. Moreover, on every session, the subject is asked about his level of anxiety every five minutes. The result of the experiment is a global acceptance of the acrophobia. The two limits of this system, according this paper, is the risk of nausea that is correlated with the duration of the session. Limiting it to 30 or 40 minutes drastically decreased the risk.
The other limitation is about subject that has a poor insight. As we can imagine, results are not so good for him.
This article makes me remember a documentary about the training of Royal Air Force pilots. In the 80’s, the United Kingdom develops a basic simulator. The area where pilots were going to be deployed had been reproduced very poorly. Vegetation was green zone, city grey one and there was just the topography (mountain … ) and high buildings (rectangular pieces). This simulator did not either offered any complex move like rollback. So basically, it was not realist at all. But pilots reported that when they were on the real field (the one that has been modeled), they were more confident and efficient because they felt just like they knew the environment.
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