Week 2 Summary – Samrat
Designing Interactive Theme Parks
The paper discusses about creating a movie/game like experience for the guests, specifically the ones that cannot be created in home environment. The discussion includes a short description of the journey of creating the VR experience.
The main points kept in mind while designing the experience are:
- There should not be a delay in acclimatizing the guest with the environment. This is achieved by not just relying on the visual cues alone. The guest is introduced with the catchy theme music and queue lines to quickly bring the user in context.
- There is a placement of actual and obvious objects like steering wheels and cannons. These interface objects were activated from the beginning to allow the user to test them before the pressure built up.
- The environment big enough to allow lot of exploring by the user but the time was kept short (5 minutes total) to have replay value. This meant that the user might wander off. This issue was tackled by placing appropriate visual cues to steer the ship in the right direction.
- Special attention was taken to make sure that every guest experiences the climax. This is ensured by making the climax come to them.
- The guests could win or lose. But the losing experience is kept more exciting to compensate for the loss.
- The whole experience is not just a sit and experience virtual environment like a movie. There are physical aspects such as moving base on cannonball hits and placing physical cannons such that the guests have to run around to man the cannons.
- The whole ride is designed such that it is shared by friends or family members.
The discussion however does not give details of the technological details of creating the experience.
Virtual Environments for Treating the Fear of Heights
This paper discusses the use of virtual reality as a means to treat acrophobia. There is a description of the designing of three virtual environments that elicit fear of height. There is also a detailed description of the experimental process.
Particular care was taken to make sure that the experience was real time. Some hardware and technological limitations were overcome by making design changes. In all three environments the subjects were placed onto more height. The responses of all the subjects were monitored and compared with the ones shown during a real situation. The experiment was carried out with student subjects that were identified as acrophobic. They were initially familiarized with the VR environment.
As the study progressed there was an obvious increase in the subject’s confidence in approaching towards real environments on height. Some of them even exposed themselves to height situations without being asked to do so. The study showed that the virtual experience recreated the same experiences that are normally experienced in real situations.
There is also a short description of applicability of VR for treating acrophobia. The treatment can be more controlled, less costly (creating real situations requires more time and effort) and most importantly certain situations can be created that are not possible in real scenario (like a mile high balcony).
Merging Virtual Objects with the Real World
This paper gives a very detailed description of creating a live 3D ultrasound imagery within the pregnant human subject. The system used head mounted display (HMD) and to show rendered and superimposed 2D images to create a live 3D feed.
The process of 3D modeling is explained in detail by describing the equipments used. Further the limitations, posed particularly by hardware, and its effect such as calibration problems, lag, etc are noted. The whole process of 3D modeling makes extensive use of graphics hardware. Also an experiment with a 38 week pregnant volunteer is described.
The papers describes the technical limitations encountered in the process such as conflicting visual cues due to missing depth information, system lag, tracking stability, HMD resolution and the need for powerful display engines. Although considering the capability of the hardware during that period the system showed interesting possibility. A short discussion about other applications is also provided which shows the potential use of ultrasound and augmented reality in the fields of architecture and for fire fighters during rescue missions.
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