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.