Training Spatial Knowledge Acquisition Using Virtual Environments

This report summarizes the work done by MIT in Year 5 (1 February 2000 through 31 January 2001) of the ONR Grant N00014-96-1-0937 entitled Training Spatial Knowledge Acquisition Using Virtual Environments. It has been prepared by Nathaniel Durlach (PI), Dr Thomas E. v. Wiegand, Andrew Brooks, Lorraine Delhorne and Jonathan Pfautz. Much of our effort during this period has been directed towards further refinement and development of the generic spatial-training simulation incorporating the World In Miniature (WIM), and the construction of a photorealistic model of a building at MIT for use in experiments involving this simulation. As part of this development, the entire simulation was rewritten in order to achieve compatibility with simulations in development at other ONR-funded institutions. Several improvements were made to deal with fidelity and operator interface considerations. The second major focus of our attention has been a program of basic research into mental factors that may affect the acquisition of spatial knowledge. Experiments were performed investigating the relationship between imagined translations and imagined rotations, following results reported elsewhere in the literature. These results have implications for the structure of coordinate space in egocentric mental representations.