Progress On Situational Awareness Project

It's been about a month since my last post, so I wanted to take a minute and jot down were we're at in the project. We've come up with a working hypothesis: "We can compensate for differences in expertise by enhancing Situational Awareness." We've also got a secondary hypothesis: "Situational Awareness can be measured by tracking the game play of the subject." This hypothesis, however, isn't defined as well.

The study will be a simple 2 x 2 design. One factor is the experience of the player. The other factor is the presence or absence of a Head Up Display which we will design and which I will describe a little bit below.

We are modding Unreal Tournament in two major ways: the first is a HUD that will help the player get their bearings on their opponents in the game. As the player sees an opponent, data for that opponent is added to a table which is displayed in the upper right-hand corner. The opponents are listed in the table from highest to lowest score. The data about the opponent is only updated on the screen when the player sees this opponent. If the player doesn't see the opponent within some set time span, the data for that opponent is removed. Of course, the data is re-added once the player sees the opponent again. This ensures that the player keeps moving thereby keeping the data fresh.

The second Unreal Tournament component of the project is a new GameType. This new game will give the player certain objectives to reach; once the objective is reached, we give the opponent a whole new set of opponents. The player then must re-learn which of his opponents pose the biggest threat.

Situational Awareness Project

As I mentioned in my first post, I am currently involved in a research project. It's my final project at the U of U before I graduate with a B.S. in Psychology and a certificate in Human Factors. This research project is the final step in the Human Factors certificate, and it's members are Dr. Frank Drews and myself. The project is still in its very early stages. Hopefully it will begin to take shape soon.

Allow me to bring you up to speed: For me, the impetus of the project was to learn more about Situational Awareness. Specifically, how it can be enhanced using computer-generated displays. Situational awareness (S.A.) is a concept in Cognitive Psychology and Human factors that represents the degree to which a person understands the meaning of the present situation and can fruitfully predict near-future outcomes in relation to it. This idea rattled around my head for a few months (I'll give you a second to digest that last sentence …), until one day I was playing a game of Command & Conquer Generals, and found my S.A. to be quite lacking. The result of this was the complete loss of my command center and the obliteration of my troops and vehicles. I then began to think of using video games as a means to learn about S.A.

As Dr. Drews and I discussed the project further, we decided we'd focus on First-Person Shooter games (like Doom, Quake or Unreal Tournament) as they were easier to fiddle around with (i.e. mod) and provided a faster pace game experience making S.A. all the more critical. So we did a brief review of FPS games out there and found Unreal Tournament 2004 to be a good mix of easy-to-mod and fun-to-play. So in the past few weeks I've been engaged in a combination of

1. Learning to play Unreal Tournament
2. Learning to mod Unreal Tournament
3. Researching other's work in Video Game/Situational Awareness research

At this point I'm not really sure where the project will head or what we will find, but it's very exciting and completely enthralling. Situational Awareness is relatively new and is currently being vigorously explored by many very smart people. Hopefully I'll be able to use some of those people's research (cited, of course) to learn about the topic. And, who knows, maybe contribute a thing or two (fingers crossed).

So that's a quick tour around the project and where it stands currently. I imagine that for the near future, the pages of this blog will be mostly devoted to this project as it similarly consumes my consciousness. Next post I'll probably go into more detail about the hypothesis of the project and some further detail into our methods.

Initial Post

So here goes the 1st post on my blog.

A little about myself:

• I'm getting ready to graduate in May with a Psychology degree.
• The field of psychology I'm interested in is called Human Factors (a.k.a. Ergonomics or Usability)
  
• I work as a web developer using ASP.NET. I work on the Presentation tier.
• I've never blogged before

Right now the most interesting/exciting thing I've got going on is a research project with my Human Factors professor. The goal of the project is to learn more about Situation Awareness by developing a mod for Unreal Tournament 2004. The exact functions and design of the mod are still somewhat in the air.

In other news, I've just launched my personal website: GuiGuru. The site is still very rough, but I would rather have something up than nothing. I'll be updating/improving it gradually as I have time and ideas. You may ask yourself: why is he using blogger rather than hosting the blog on his own site? For two reasons:

1. I'm Lazy
2. I'm Busy

Those may seem like two mutually exclusive things and believe me, I wish they were. The point, though, is that one of the improvements on GuiGuru I have planned is to integrate this blog there. For now, Blogger is free and, so far, pretty easy.

So how's that for an initial post?