Although fulldome video digital theaters evolved from traditional planétariums, they are more akin to virtual reality (VR) theaters that create large-scale, group immersive experiences. In order to help understand how immersion and wide fields-of-view (FOV) impact learning, we studied the use of visualizations on topics that do and do not require spatial understanding in astronomy classes. We find a significant difference between students who viewed visualizations in the dome versus those that saw non-immersive content in their classrooms, with the former showing the greatest retention. Our results suggest that immersive visuals help free up cognitive resources that can be used to build mental models requiring spatial understanding, and the physical display size combined with the wide FOV may result in greater attention. Although fulldome is a complementary medium to traditional VR, our results have implications for future head-mounted displays.

VR applications provide an opportunity to study a variety of new applications. One of the focus areas of the media convergence, games and media integration (McGMI) program is to develop new media applications for the visually impaired population. We are particularly interested in developing applications which are at the same time interesting for the sighted population as well-hence the title-crossover applications. Bonnie Snyder, who has been working with the visually impaired population for more than twenty years, visited a group of students early in the Fall 2008 As many typical applications are geared toward sighted population, the cost of software and hardware systems tend to be a lot higher. In addition, several games, developed for primarily the sighted, provide minimal interaction for the blind. Although this issue remains a topic of discussion in both IEEE VR and ISMAR and related conferences, much more can be done. We used this as motivation and developed three applications for both the sighted and the visually impaired population (a) haptic chess program combines PHANTOM force feedback interaction with OpenAL audio; (b) Simple hand movement recognition on iPhone provides a hierarchical menu application; (c) Barnyard fun program uses interesting animal-sound feedback to facilitate spatial selection. In future, we expect to conduct testing of these applications in Denver Museum as possible.