It's cheaper and safer to train a pilot through a virtual navigation exercise than to start him or her off immediately in an expensive aircraft. And soldiers are better prepared to figure out the lay of the land if they envision their assignments on computerized virtual environments rather than simply on road maps. Other professionals are also trained more effectively and less expensively through virtual 3-D worlds on a computer rather than by paper flat images alone. And psychology researchers examining learning find data collection greatly enhanced using virtual reality studies.
Alicia McDonald, a senior psychology and sociology double major and gender studies minor at Saint Michael's College, has received a $3,500 NASA-VT Space Grant to study how to improve the virtual navigation experience. McDonald, the daughter of Lisa J. McDonald of Holliston, Mass., graduated from
Holliston High School in 2005, before coming to Saint Michael's.
McDonald will build on a study done by her professor, Dr. Anthony Richardson, a Shelburne, Vt., resident, of the Saint Michael's psychology department. Professor Richardson's work explored people's spatial orientation in wide fields-made wide through the use of three computer screens. That study used simple, as opposed to rich, wide fields, or environments, composed of hallways the person traveled through. McDonald's study is using elaborate, deep, colorful fields.
"Learning about a new place from a static computer screen is different than learning in the real world, which includes body movement," Professor Richardson said. "Alicia's study using wide fields of views is important in that it may show us the best way to optimize environmental learning through virtual simulations."
McDonald is building rich environments, allowing the viewer to move up and down and around corners, over and through various paths, on three computer screens. With the help of an expert computer science student and her professor, she is creating an environment to examine how men and women navigate these virtual worlds. Once these worlds are created, the young psychology student will put her 50 subjects, 25 men and 25 women, through very controlled tests of navigating the environment on the computer screens.
Men have been shown to be better able to navigate spatially than women, but women are shown to improve their navigation ability if they are tested on wide fields, rather than narrow fields. This hypothesis will be tested in a very controlled way through McDonald's study, which is titled, "The Influence of Wide Fields of View and Visually Rich Environments in Virtual Navigation." Or, Do Wide Screens of View, in Rich Virtual Environments, Improve People's Spatial Orientation?
"Potential for a published article"
"Alicia has put a tremendous amount of work into this project," Professor Richardson said. "Her efforts have good potential to become part of a published article, making a valuable scientific contribution to this field of study."
She and Professor Richardson will take the results of the study to NASA facilities either at Langley Research Center in Virginia or Moffett Field in California, sometime during the coming year.
McDonald plans to supplement her summer research project with another similar project for her senior thesis during the school year in order to validate her results. With two studies, her results are more likely to be in the realm of publishable work, she said.
Saint Michael's College, founded in 1904 by the Society of St. Edmund and headed by President John J. Neuhauser, is identified by the Princeton Review as one of the nation's Best 368 Colleges. A liberal arts, residential, Catholic college, Saint Michael's is located just outside of Burlington, Vermont, one of America's top college towns and less than two hours from Montreal. As one of only 270 institutions nationwide with a prestigious Phi Beta Kappa chapter on campus, Saint Michael's has 2,000 full-time undergraduate students, some 500 graduate students and 200 international students. In recent years Saint Michael's students and professors have received Rhodes, Woodrow Wilson, Guggenheim, Fulbright, National Science Foundation and other grants, and Saint Michael's professors have been named Vermont Professor of the Year in four of the last eight years. The college is currently listed as one of the nation's Best Liberal Arts Colleges in the 2008 U.S. News & World Report rankings.