Article archive / July 1, 2012
Originally published: . Volume 3, No. 11. Source pages: 1, 8.
Thirty years ago Walt Disney’s Tron brought the idea of experiencing life inside a virtual world to the public’s imagination. Tron would go on to become a cult sensation for science fiction and computer game enthusiasts, drawing on the psychological appeal of an exciting, malleable world waiting for us at our fingertips–at our computer keyboards to be exact.
Today the idea isn’t strange at all. Dr. Rick Stevens, associate professor of psychology at the U. of Louisiana of Monroe, has used the technology of the “virtual world” to help him with his research, to get his students involved, and just to “liven up classes a bit,” he told the Times.
“Virtual reality,” he said, “is a process in which the cues that we use to generate our mental model of the world are used to produce a shared visual environment.”
“It's a concept used to create games, but when people refer to virtual worlds they usually refer to environments set up with no game aspects,” Stevens explained. There are no rules, points, or competition like in computer games. The virtual world is used to simulate face-to-face interactions. “It's surprising how real the interaction seems after you become familiar with the interface,” he said.
Dr. Stevens has always been intrigued by the idea of virtual reality, he told the Times. The “virtual world” has grown in popularity in recent years. It provides a digital setting where people assume a character, called avatars, to interact with others, experiment, or learn a new task with the help of a creative, novel cyberspace setting, he said.
One of the most popular sites on the web is Second Life. People assume an avatar identity and interact with others in this digitally created environment, he explained.
“It’s also an interesting creative outlet,” said Stevens. “You can be creative in a Super Legos sort of way, building things. Some people are quite artistic in their creations. It’s interesting to just be a tourist in Second Life, the biggest, most developed virtual world.”
Some of the areas in Second Life are beautifully crafted and very appealing, worth touring as a visitor he explained. “The Mayan temple complex of Chicken Itza, the Cotton Club and the 1920's area of Harlem, a lunar landing site, and Foul Whisperings – a Macbeth site … these are very nice tourist areas that people have put a lot of time into.”
Dr. Stevens, whose research interests includes human cognition, has used the virtual setting to conduct some of his psychological experiments.
“I've been using virtual reality programs to conduct memory research.” He hopes that his work can uncover some ways to use this virtual technology to produce better online classes.
“It could possibly point to ways to produce better ebooks, too,” he noted. A recent study examined how ebooks lose contextual cues that are present in real books, Stevens explained. This makes it harder to learn material from ebooks. “Virtual reality gives you a lot of control over cues and there may be ways to make computer presentations easier to recall rather than harder.”
Dr. Stevens also has used the technology in his graduate classes, having students develop a class presentation in virtual space. “I have them do a presentation or two,” he explained. “It is partly to familiarize them with the process and some are less nervous to present that way.” His students become familiar with the virtual setting in the fall, and when he has the same group of students for research methods, he has them create virtual experiments.
"The cyber space idea, portraying web addresses and computing processes as physical objects arranged in and moving around in a physical space, is a way to generate a mental model of some fairly abstract and complex computing processes,” he said.
Dr. Stevens hopes that in some ways this work can help develop cost- effective technologies for education. “It’s handy, kind of fun, and because of years of budget cuts we have no lab equipment or rooms. It’s a relatively cheap replacement. There is a learning curve and it would be hard to work with large classes this way, but it works well for the smaller grad classes.”
Dr. Stevens pointed out that psychological applications in this technology are growing. Virtual worlds are now being developed to treat phobias and there are studies using virtual worlds to present stimuli in physiological measures such as MRIs and PETs. There are two journals, he noted, that address the topics: Cyberphsychology and Cyberpsychology, Behavior, and Social Networking.
The University of New Orleans worked at creating six or seven “islands” or discrete teaching areas, to produce classes on virtual world interaction. “However, they had limited success at getting people to use them for teaching,” he noted.
Dr. Stevens is currently working on ideas with Dr. William Barnett, chair of Computer Information Systems at ULM. “He and I have been talking about doing a study to compare face to face, virtual world, and video setups like Google Plus’s video hangout or Go To Meeting in tasks requiring collaboration. We are just in the planning stages.”
"Virtual worlds have been slow to catch on," Stevens said. "I think it is partly the cartoonish aspect ….” And, “Non- gamers are sometimes put off at having to learn new skills to make use of virtual worlds as tools.”
However, he explained, the power of virtual world technology will likely continue due to the financial benefit of distance learning and collaboration. A new project just began in Atlanta, he noted, where 3800 students in 35 schools will get a virtual world for each class. And, “Big, international tech companies run their own private setups to collaborate on projects,” he said.
“So, in general, it is still ‘early adopter’ territory, but I think that as the software matures it will catch on,” Dr. Stevens said to the Times.
The virtual world setting created by Dr. Rick Stevens. This setting exists in Second Life and resembles the U. of Louisiana Monroe Library. Dr. Stevens’ avatar is the small figure in front. Dr. Rick Stevens created this version of the Ames Room Illusion for his work with virtual settings. It exists in OSGrid. “It works and you can walk around in it,” he told the Times.
This article is part of a historical newspaper archive. Read the original issue for its original layout, photographs and graphics.