A Virtual Environment System for the Comparative Study of Dome and HMD

over these years and for having given me the opportunity to work on several projects. I would also like to extend my sincere appreciations to Dr. Ernst L. Leiss who is so generous in his support at various stages, for his thorough review of my thesis, f or every valuable comment he has made, and for serving as chairperson of my thesis committee. My thanks also go to Dr. Ioannis A. Kakadiaris for his support in providing office space and machines during this research work. master thesis committee and for all that they have taught me about doing research. her continuous support on this project; and to Ms. Taylor Laura, who is in charge of the human subject test on this project, for helping me set up the system at NASA/JSC. Furthermore, I would like to thank the staff members: in particular, Ching-yao Lin, for his suggestions on many aspects of this research, for always having time to answer my queries and doubts, and for tutoring me in programming skills and in the art of virtual reality technologies; Hector Garcia who used his magic hand to create the beautiful virtual scenario and never tired of providing technical support over these years; and Chau Cao, who set up a completely basic version of the system. iv Most of all, I am very grateful to my parents for their love, support, and encouragement. They set a good example for me. And finally, I thank my husband, Meng Ling, for his steadfast support, patience, and love. ABSTRACT At NASA/JSC, researchers must choose visual display devices that best fit ground training applications in a virtual environment (VE) system. Two major display devices are a 3.7-meter spherical dome equipped with an Elumens™ projector and a VR4® head-mounted display (HMD). They differ in many aspects, such as quality of stereo, field of view, level of immersion, resolution, and the interfaces and interactions. Finally, the related human factor issues, especially subject performance, are not well identified. A virtual environment system was developed to assist in the comparison of the relative merits of these two different delivery systems based on pick-and-release tasks. The rendering engine is an SGI Octane SSE computer. The virtual environment system supports pick-and-release tasks. Multiple hardware devices, such as a joystick, a LogiTech™ three-dimensional mouse, and a head-tracker, are integrated to support the interactions. Audio stimuli, besides visual channels, are added to form a …