Mohammadamin Sanaei

Formal methods have proven helpful in modeling complex systems and ensuring they function correctly. This paper offers some basic guidelines for HFES practitioners in choosing whether to employ formal methods. It also touches on emerging approaches to modeling human behavior, attempting to answer two questions: (1) When are formal methods worth the effort? and (2) How do formal methods apply to humans? A table of questions is offered to facilitate a discussion of tradeoffs in choosing a formal methods approach. Distribution statement A. Approved for public release: distribution unlimited.

This study explored the effects of scene complexity factor on cybersickness. In this between-subjects experiment, 44 participants played the Pendulum Chair VR game, half with a simple scene and half with a complex scene. The complex scene featured higher optic flow (lower-level perceptual factor) and higher familiarity (higher level factor). Dependent variables were cybersickness and task performance. Results were unexpected in that cybersickness did not differ significantly between the simple and complex scenes. These results suggest that the impact of optic flow and familiarity on cybersickness may be affected by each other or other factors, making them unreliable predictors of cybersickness if considered alone. Both lower level and higher-level factors would benefit from further research to deduce the conditions under which they affect cybersickness. VR designers could consider that optic flow and familiarity alone are not reliable factors when predicting the cybersickness-inducing effects of a new environment.

Currently there is no easy way to rate the ease of evacuation from a building in case of fire or a shooter. Multiple tools, based on agent-based models, exist to simulate building evacuation. However, they have not been compared with human perceptual data of how easy people think it would be to evacuate from a building. This research is part of a project to establish an EASE score (Evacuation with Acceptable Simplicity in Emergencies) and validate that metric with human data. In this study, the authors asked participants to evaluate seven 2D building floor plans for ease of evacuation. There is a gap in the research on perceptions of floor plans which motivated this study’s research questions: (a) Do non-expert users agree on the ease of building evacuation? (b) What factors do viewers use to evaluate ease of evacuation?

Apple's 1987 Knowledge Navigator video contains a vision of a sophisticated digital personal assistant, but the natural human-agent conversational dialog shown does not currently exist. To investigate why, the authors analyzed the video using three theoretical frameworks: the DiCoT framework, the HAT Game Analysis framework, and the Flows of Power framework. These were used to codify the human-agent interactions and classify the agent's capabilities. While some barriers to creating such agents are technological, other barriers arise from privacy, social and situational factors, trust, and the financial business case. The social roles and asymmetric interactions of the human and agent are discussed in the broader context of HAT research, along with the need for a new term for these agents that does not rely on a human social relationship metaphor. This research offers designers of conversational agents a research roadmap to build more highly capable and trusted non-human teammates.

Despite advances in VR hardware, cybersickness remains a key barrier to VR. Having a common customizable research platform could help the research community. This paper introduces a cybersickness research platform called Pendulum Chair for “spinning world” (egocentric rotation) experiences. The design of Pendulum Chair is justified and four different conditions are described from a Pendulum Chair study as validation. The conditions were defined as two different background scenes and two conditions of music. Data from 56 participants were collected and results showed that in all four conditions, participants reported cybersickness. The use of the open-source Pendulum Chair Unity project could enable stronger comparisons across cybersickness studies.

Communication performance is highly context sensitive and difficult to quantify. In the SCOTTIE project (Systematic Communication Objectives and Telecommunications Technology Investigations and Evaluations), the goal is to investigate the impact of the communication medium on team performance and effectiveness. The human decision to travel or replace travel with telecommunications can be extracted from SCOTTIE, rather than relying on intuition and opinion. This poster analyzes four social communication constructs and compares them in Face-to-Face, Video Conferencing, and Virtual Reality training scenarios. Co-presence, engagement, rapport, and trust were the four constructs. Data from 105 participants across the three between-subject conditions showed that engagement was the only construct that had a statistically significant difference between the three training environments.