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published_or_final_version / abstract / toc / Industrial and Manufacturing Systems Engineering / Master / Master of Philosophy

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Approved for public release; distribution is unlimited / This thesis attempts to lay a foundation for producing a real-time rope model suitable for game engine usage. The model presented here is only one of the many possible approaches in modeling a rope. The basic premise used was derived from Erkin Tunca's source code. The concept is then attempted on the Open Dynamics Engine (ODE) built by Russell Smith. This work shows promise but much still needs to be done. This thesis only scratches the surface on the subject. In addition, ODE is primarily designed for (articulated) rigid bodies. Therefore, the next step is to create a deformable body (the rope) in ODE. / Major, United States Army

Due to declining budgets and decreases in ammunition allowances, the opportunity to conduct live fire artillery training has been greatly reduced. The available simulation trainers are either outdated, require specialize contractor support, or are not deployable. FOPCSim was developed at no cost, is freely available, takes advantages of modern 3D graphics, eliminates costly contractor support, and will run on laptops in support of deploying units. The simulator provides users with real-time performance feedback based on the Marine Corps Training and Readiness standards and was designed according to a cognitive task analysis of the call for fire procedures. To evaluate how well FOPCSim trains the call for fire procedures, an experiment was conducted at The Basic School in Quantico, Virginia. FOPCSim was used in place of the current simulation: Training Set, Fire Observation (TSFO) to evaluate its training effectiveness. By eliminating the overhead associated with most simulators, FOPCSim allows users to perform the call for fire procedures with a high degree of repetitiveness which is needed to train this type of task.

Conducting training in a new or unfamiliar environment requires a certain amount of time to acquire the necessary spatial orientation and familiarity to that environment's physical layout. This thesis explores the effects of exposing individuals to a PC-based virtual replication of a small-scale real world training environment to determine if such exposure has any effect on an individual's ability to acquire the necessary spatial orientation and familiarity of the real world environment. In this thesis individual spatial orientation and familiarity to the layout of the real world environment will be measured using a set of retrieval tasks conducted in the real environment and by development of a sketched map of that environment. Establishing a link between an individual's ability to gain an acceptable level of spatial orientation and familiarity with a real world environment by first exposing them to a PC-based virtual replication of that environment is vital to the future of video game development and virtual simulation technologies used for training in the military.

One of the largest application domains for Virtual Reality lies in simulating the Real World. Contemporary applications of virtual environments include training devices for surgery, component assembly and maintenance, all of which require a high fidelity reproduction of psychomotor skills. One extremely important research question in this field is: "How closely does our facsimile of a real task in a virtual environment reproduce that Task?" At present the field of Virtual Reality is answering this question in subjective terms by the concept of presence and in objective terms by measures of task performance or training effectiveness ratios.

"A Masters Project ... Animation and Interactive Media, Faculty of Art, Design and Communication, RMIT University, Melbourne"--Title screen. Title from title screen. System requirement: CD-ROM drive, Realplayer, Beatnik, Koan audio.

This study evaluated the transfer of training and training efficiency of two virtual reality environments (head-mounted display and personal computer) for a complex manual assembly task. Transfer of training was measured by comparing the post-training performance of two virtual training groups, a real-world training group and a control group that received no training. All training groups were taught to assemble a Lego(TM) forklift model in their respective environment. After training, participants assembled a real-world model of the forklift as well as a novel model of a racecar, which required the same parts as the forklift assembled in a different configuration. Results from this study show that virtual environments can be effective training simulators for complex assembly tasks although they are less efficient than real-world training. The results also suggest that individual differences such as general intelligence, spatial aptitude, and computer user self-efficacy influence one's ability to learn in a virtual environment. / Thesis (Ph.D.)--Wichita State University, Dept. of Psychology, College of Liberal Arts and Sciences. / "May 2005."