TRAVEL IN IMMERSIVE VIRTUAL LEARNING ENVIRONMENTS: A USER STUDY WITH CHILDREN
Author(s):
Nicoletta Adamo-villani,
David Jones
Paper abstract: This paper describes the development and evaluation of three (3) first-person travel interfaces for
immersive environments. The three interfaces presented in the paper have been developed for the
SMILE™ project (Science and Math in an Immersive Learning Environment), an immersive learning
game that employs a fantasy 3D virtual world to engage deaf and hearing children in math and sciencebased
educational tasks. Two interfaces are hand-based, while the third one allows for hands-free motion
control. The evaluation aims to: (1) determine which interface is the most effective for the hearing users
of SMILE™ in terms of accuracy, speed, appeal, and ease of learning, and (2) identify any gender
differences in using the three travel methods. To accomplish this objective we have designed an
experiment which compares the three techniques for moving directly to a target object; we varied the
distance of the object from the user’s starting position and the complexity of the path (number of turns)
to reach the destination. Ten (10) hearing children ages 6-11 participated in the study; results show that
although all travel techniques are easy to comprehend and use, the wand is the most effective interface.
To our knowledge, this is the first paper that reports a study of immersive travel techniques with
children. In a future publication we will report the results of the same experiment with non-hearing
children.
