Understanding Human Behaviour In Virtual Reality Environments

This work introduces a FOVE Head Mounted Display (HMD) as a means of tracking eye movement in an immersive VR environment to determine where VR users are looking as they complete a pre-defined task. The aim is to determine its applicability to research into user distraction when designing human / machine interfaces. A virtual flight simulator environment is presented as a test case. The work has shown that FOVE eye tracking technology can record vector based data to enable post experimental analysis of where a user is looking in a given scenario. Levels of distraction can be determined based on the differences between where they should be focusing based on a given flight phase and what they are actually looking at. The work also demonstrates how CAD translation between the design and VR environments is key to the provision of a more realistic VR environment. Polygon based models are more efficient for dynamic imaging in the VR environment relative to the NURB based models which form the basis for geometry constructed in CAD packages.