We present the development and evaluation of the Virtual Experience Test (VET). The VET is a survey instrument used to measure holistic virtual environment experiences based upon the five dimensions of experiential design: sensory, cognitive, affective, active, and relational. Experiential Design (ED) is a holistic approach to enhance presence in virtual environments that goes beyond existing presence theory (i.e. a focus on the sensory aspects of VE experiences) to include affective and cognitive factors. To evaluate the VET, 62 participants played the commercial video game Mirror's Edge. After gameplay both the VET and the ITC-Sense of Presence Inventory (ITC-SOPI) were administered. A principal component analysis was performed on the VET and it was determined that the actual question clustering coincided with the proposed dimensions of experiential design. Furthermore, scores from the VET were shown to have a significant relationship with presence scores on the ITC-SOPI. The results of this research produced a validated measure of holistic experience that could be used to evaluate virtual environments. Furthermore, our experiment indicates that virtual environments utilizing holistic designs can result in significantly higher presence.

Existing work on menu techniques has shown linear menus to be less efficient and reliable for menuing tasks when compared to radial menus. With the rise in popularity of 3D spatial interaction in console gaming, such as the Nintendo Wii, it is important to determine whether the existing findings still hold true when using a 3D pointing device such as the Wii Controller. Linear menus were compared with two other menu techniques: radial menus and rotary menus. Effectiveness was measured through task completion time and the number of task errors. A subjective measure was also taken to determine participant preferences. Participants performed faster and made fewer errors when using the radial menu technique. Radial menus were also preferred by participants. These results indicate that radial menus are an effective menu technique when used with a 3D pointing device. This appears to agree with previous work regarding radial menus and indicates that the usage of radial menus in gaming applications should be investigated further.

In this paper, we introduce a cognitive agent architecture that can be used in the study of Human-Robot Interaction. The Cognitive Architecture for Perception-Reaction Intelligent Computer Agents (CAPRICA) is an extensible agent library built around the ideas of theory of mind, episodic memory, and embodied cognition. Existing agent research in each of these areas was used to formulate design requirements. We provide an overview of the library's design and discuss future work in progress.