Utah: USA

The U.S. sample will be drawn primarily from Salt Lake City, and will be used for comparative purposes and to provide information that cannot be collected in the field. Because some tasks will not be feasible at the field sites, the Utah sample will allow us to establish correlations in performance among measures used in the field and those used more typically in industrialized populations. In addition, the University of Utah's virtual environment (VR) lab will allow us to compare performance in a full-mobility virtual environment with the laptop-based virtual environments used in the field.

Drs. Sarah Creem-Regehr and Jeanine Stefanucci are the primary researchers at the Utah site. They are two of the principal investigators who run the Virtual Environment Lab housed in the psychology building on campus. The lab consists of a tracked head-mounted display (HMD) space approximately 7m by 11.6m in size. Head tracking is done using a WorldViz PPT-H optically-based system, which employs six high resolution, rapid update cameras combined with an Intersense InertiaCube3 inertial orientation sensor. Real-time rendering and virtual environment control is done using the WorldViz Vizard software system. Body tracking uses additional PPT-H markers for the user's hands and feet, each coupled with its own Intersense InertiaCube3 orientation sensor.

real-world lab
virtual lab
head-mounted display