Published: 2003
Total Pages:
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The purpose of this research was to assess the relationship between telepresence and performance in a synthetic environment. Telepresence is believed to be a mental construct and to enhance task performance in teleoperations and virtual environments. Consequently, it has been identified as a design ideal for synthetic environments. However, there is a limited understanding of telepresence and its relation to task performance. This research involved examination of a range of synthetic environment design features (e.g., viewpoint and auditory cue type) that were suspected to influence telepresence and compared differences in telepresence and task performance caused by manipulations of these factors and task difficulty. A simulated basketball free-throw task was used in which subjects controlled the motions of a virtual basketball player. In addition to the basketball task performance (baskets/goals), subjects were required to report camera flashes in the virtual environment (stadium) and to simultaneously detect strobe light flashes in a real research laboratory. These tasks were designed as secondary-monitoring tasks and were intended to assess subject attention allocation to the virtual and real environments as an indicator of telepresence. Each subject was exposed to a single viewpoint condition including either an egocentric view, an exocentric view from behind the player, an exocentric view from the sideline of the court, or a selectable viewpoint. They were also exposed to four virtual sound conditions including task-relevant sounds, task-irrelevant sounds, a combination of sounds and no sound, as well as two visual display fidelity conditions including a low fidelity stadium composed of rendered walls surrounding the basketball court and a high fidelity stadium that displayed a texture of a crowd watching the game. Finally, the subjects experienced two task difficulty conditions including 2-point and 3-point shots. The order of presentation of the sound, fideli.