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.