Post-doctoral cognitive psychologist Hunter Hoffman joined the HITLab as a research engineer on the AFOSR and VRRV projects last summer. After spending 10 years studying with several of the world's most influential researchers of human memory (e.g., Elizabeth Loftus in UWs Psychology Dept.) he is now applying research tools and techniques from cognitive psychology to the study of human factors issues associated with virtual reality.

One of Dr. Hoffman's projects, Virtual Chess, investigates presence, the sensation that one is "in a place" when experiencing a virtual world. People can get mildly immersed in a good movie or book, but the sensation of "being there" is uniquely strong in virtual reality because cues the participants get from VR computers are especially convincing (e.g., the scene moves in realistic ways when the participant moves her head, objects in the virtual world respond to her actions etc). VR researchers speculate that presence may improve sensori-motor or cognitive performance within virtual reality, and improve the efficiency of training and planning. It may also enhance learning and transfer of training to the real world. Understanding what presence is, and learning how to cultivate it, are important research goals at the HITLab.

Participants in virtual reality must deal with conflicting sensory information. Some of their attention is drawn into the virtual world, yet at some level, participants remain aware that they are merely standing in a lab room wearing a helmet. Presumably, the more attention captured by the virtual world, the more present people will feel.

In collaboration with HITLab colleagues Jerry Prothero, and Max Wells, Dr. Hoffman recently tested the hypothesis that meaningful information would draw participant's attention into the virtual world, increasing the sense of presence. The experiment drew upon a classic paradigm used to test the memory of chess players for arrangements of chess pieces (Chase and Simon, 1972). In the original experiment it was shown that expert chess players could remember meaningful arrangements of chess peices (e.g., a defense surrounding each of the Kings, with a power struggle in progress in the center of the board) better than novices, but their performance was no better than novices when asked to remember random arrangements.

In the current experiment chess players were shown chessboards in virtual and real worlds. For some of the virtual chessboards, the pieces were arranged in meaningful positions. For other virtual boards, the chess pieces were arranged randomly on the board. After taking a memory test, subjects filled out a questionnaire assessing their subjective experience of "presence" for each type of chessboard.

As predicted, subjects reported feeling considerably more present in the meaningful chess boards. Analyses yielded a highly significant statistical difference in mean ratings of presence for meaningful vs. meaningless chess boards. This shows that two worlds created with the same virtual reality equipment, using identical software and showing identical chess pieces (but in different patterns) can produce different levels of presence in subjects, depending on how meaningful the participants find the content of each world. These results reinforce the role of the mental model in the interpretation of displayed information. The findings may aid in the optimization of the information content of display devices.

The results of the virtual chess experiment are also relevant to the various educational projects that are being pursued in the HIT Lab. Dr. Hoffman speculates that students entering a world that explores a familiar topic are likely to feel more "present" in that world than naive students in the identical virtual world. Since "presence" is thought to enhance learning, this could lead to a "rich get richer" effect with respect to knowledge acquisition from virtual environments. Students familiar with the virtual world (or with the information content of that world) will be likely to learn more during their time in VR than naive students. Familiarity could be acquired from traditional school curriculum, and/or by letting students create some of the component virtual objects that go into virtual worlds. (K-12 students collectively design and create virtual worlds in the classrooms of public schools participating in the U.S. West VRRV project). It may be that people who have been in virtual reality several times will feel more present. One of Dr. Hoffman's main goals as the research specialist of the VRRV project is to study ways of making the students' VR learning experience as fruitful as possible. As evidenced by his Virtual Chess project, his research contributes to our understanding of what presence is, and how it can be enhanced. Further research currently underway in collaboration with Dr. Winn and other HITLab colleagues will begin to explore the extent to which presence (and tele-presence) enhances student learning, and the cirumstances under which enhancement is most likely to occur. Hunter is also interested in exploring the value of meaning in evoking telepresence in networked, multiparticipant virtual environments.

Dr. Hoffman was recently invited/funded by the Japanese government to present the virtual chess results and an overview of HITLab's research to Japanese researchers (March, 1995).