In recent years, consumers have witnessed a technological revolution that has delivered more-realistic experiences in their own homes through high-definition, stereoscopic televisions and natural, gesture-based video game consoles. Although these experiences are more realistic, offering higher levels of fidelity, it is not clear how the increased display and interaction aspects of fidelity impact the user experience. Since immersive virtual reality (VR) allows us to achieve very high levels of fidelity, we designed and conducted a study that used a six-sided CAVE to evaluate display fidelity and interaction fidelity independently, at extremely high and low levels, for a VR first-person shooter (FPS) game. Our goal was to gain a better understanding of the effects of fidelity on the user in a complex, performance-intensive context. The results of our study indicate that both display and interaction fidelity significantly affect strategy and performance, as well as subjective judgments of presence, engagement, and usability. In particular, performance results were strongly in favor of two conditions: low-display, low-interaction fidelity (representative of traditional FPS games) and high-display, high-interaction fidelity (similar to the real world).

When viewed from below, a user's feet cast shadows onto the floor screen of an under-floor projection system, such as a six-sided CAVE. Tracking those shadows with a camera provides enough information for calculating a user's ground-plane location, foot orientation, and footstep events. We present Shadow Walking, an unencumbered locomotion technique that uses shadow tracking to sense a user's walking direction and step speed. Shadow Walking affords virtual locomotion by detecting if a user is walking in place. In addition, Shadow Walking supports a sidestep gesture, similar to the iPhone's pinch gesture. In this paper, we describe how we implemented Shadow Walking and present a preliminary assessment of our new locomotion technique. We have found Shadow Walking provides advantages of being unencumbered, inexpensive, and easy to implement compared to other walking-in-place approaches. It also has potential for extended gestures and multi-user locomotion.

We present DiVE into Alcohol, a virtual reality (VR) program that can be used in chemistry education at the high school and college level, both as an immersive experience, or as a web-based program. The program is presented in the context of an engaging topic--the oxidation of alcohol based on genetic differences in metabolism within the liver cell. The user follows alcohol molecules through the body to the liver and into the enzyme active site where the alcohol is oxidized. A gaming format allows the user to choose molecules and orient them in 3D space to enable the oxidation reaction. Interactivity also includes choices of different forms of the enzyme based on the genetically-coded structure and rates of oxidation that lead to intoxication vs sickness. DiVE into Alcohol was constructed with the use of a variety of software that provide enzyme structure ("pdb" files, MolProbity, 3D Kinemage), modeling (Autodesk Maya™), and VR technology (3DVIA VirTools™) .

We present Redgraph, a generic virtual reality (VR) visualization program for network data, based on resource description framework (RDF), the primary standard of data underlying the semantic Web. Redgraph bypasses a number of problems in 3D graph visualization by relying on users to interactively "extrude" a 2D network into the third dimension. This pilot study applies Redgraph to data from the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office to explore innovations in the history of computer science. Comparison of subjects' response times utilizing 3D pull-out vs. 2D strategies on tasks involving fine grained connectivity or broad network observation found that subjects were faster correctly answering questions involving fine-grained connectivity using 3D strategies, particularly when data was densely clustered. Subjects' qualitative feedback suggests that the most valuable application of this 3D technique lies in untimed exploration to discover relationships in the underlying data structure.