NCSA NEWS

With the number of virtual reality CAVEs installed in research institutions now topping 100, an Alliance team at Virginia Tech has decided it is time to determine which characteristics of the applications that run in these room-sized VR environments help or constrain scientific research. Deborah Hix from Virginia Tech and Joseph L. Gabbard from VPST, Inc. are creating a framework in which they can assess the usability of VR applications. They're evaluating, for instance, whether the applications offer capabilities scientists need and whether these capabilities are easy to use.

"Our goal is to increase awareness of the need for usability evaluations of VR applications," says Hix, "and this study will help build a scientific foundation for developing innovative methods in testing the usability of virtual reality programs."

To help test her theories and validate the framework, Hix's team is evaluating Crumbs, a volume-rendering software developed for the CAVE by Rachael Brady, a member of NCSA's Biological Imaging Group and the Alliance's Scientific Instrumentation Application Technologies team. Crumbs was first released in 1994 and has seen its popularity increase with the proliferation of CAVEs. Researchers like Crumbs because it is sufficiently generic that it accommodates almost any dataset, enabling them to get up and running quickly in the CAVE. Brady hopes that by participating in Hix's study, her team will learn of more ways to improve Crumbs.

The evaluation has already had an impact. An early heuristic study by Virginia Tech student Kent Swartz has resulted in several recommendations for improving the user interface to Crumbs, such as consistency in the language on the menuing system and tool interaction.

Full user studies are scheduled for late January in the CAVEs at NCSA and Virginia Tech. "Both CAVEs are being used so we can determine if a particular CAVE installation affects the usability of a particular application" says Umesh Thakkar, a member of the Visualization and Virtual Environments Group at NCSA, who will assist Swartz in monitoring the users. Experience indicates that everything from the setup of the software to the physical layout of the CAVE affects the ease with which researchers can explore their data in VR. Results will be available in May.

Access Online | Posted 1-26-1999