Volume 3 Issue 2
Authors: Iwan Kelaiah; Manolya Kavakli; Ken Cheng
Abstract: This study examined the effects of simulator sickness (SS) as a function of the visual complexity of animated virtual actors (AVAs) and the virtual environment (VE) in a virtual scene. Visually complex stimuli may be attractive; however, studies on SS indicate the possibility of significant health risks outweighing the expected benefit in virtual reality (VR) simulations. This study used a series of simulations to teach the basic skills required for village fire fighting to manage fires caused by car accidents. The participants learnt in one of 4 experimental conditions; simple (simple AVAs and simple VE), simple world (lifelike AVAs and simple VE), simple AVAs (simple AVAs and lifelike VE) and lifelike (lifelike AVAs and lifelike VE). We predicted that: (1) SS ratings would increase with the scenes’ visual complexity and (2) simpler VEs would compensate for the effects of visually complex AVAs. Surprisingly, the results contradicted our predictions, with no effect of either variable. We discuss possible explanations for these results, and suggest future research directions to design safe VR simulations.
Keywords: Animated-Virtual Actors; Virtual Environment; Simulator Sickness; Virtual Reality; Virtual Scene; Visual Complexity; Visualisation; Vection
Authors: Liusheng Wang; Xiaoxia Rong; Biao Sang
Abstract: Urbanization can change population structures and improve citizens’ quality of life. However, little attention has been paid to whether urbanization influences the psychological development of adolescents as new urban citizens. This research compared the processing of affective concepts by adolescents new to urban life with that by children raised in urban environments, while posing different body postures (sitting upright, slumped over). Sixty-five 7th grade children in China participated; some were new to urban environments (new urban citizens), while the others grew up as urban-dwellers (old urban citizens). The participants were required to make lexical decisions which measured how quickly people can differentiate actual words and pseudo-words. The results showed the main effects of body posture, identity and valence, as well as an interaction effect between identity and body posture, an interaction effect between identity and valence. All participants responded faster while slumped over as opposed to sitting upright, the old urban citizens responded faster than new urban citizens did; and both the old and new urban citizens responded faster when slumped over than when sitting upright; but new urban citizens exhibited significantly greater differences between the two postures. The results indicate that, although urbanization can change people very quickly, a gap in psychological development is still present between new and old urban adolescents, and body posture implicitly influences the processing of affective concepts.
Keywords: Affective Concept Processing; Embodied Cognition; Adolescent; Urbanization