Human Factors Guidelines for Interactive 3D and Games-Based ...

2.0 Background: Why Human Factors Guidelines for
i3D and Games-Based Training?
Whilst it is not the goal of this guidelines document to provide a comprehensive critique of Virtual
Reality and associated technologies, it is important to appreciate why the discipline failed to deliver
(in all but a very small number of applications domains) and why the lessons learned should not be
forgotten at this early stage in the development of gaming technologies and related i3D simulations.
In the late 1980s and the early 1990s, the die-hard proponents
of VR were convinced that, come the end of the 20 th Century,
users of today’s real-time, multi-sensory computer environments
would be exclusively wearing head-mounted displays (HMDs –
Figures 1 and 3 – upper image), instrumented gloves, suits and
body-mounted spatial tracking systems. As can be seen today,
this vision simply did not come to pass in the real world. Neither
did similar claims that VR users would be found sitting at Star
Trek-like consoles with stereoscopic displays, or stand within
multi-wall projection display facilities (“CAVEs” 5 – Figure 3,
lower image), driven by “graphics supercomputers”.
Instead, these users are, today, to be found in domestic,
commercial and defence settings, using a mouse and keyboard
– possibly a joystick or gamepad – facing a conventional
computer screen displaying images from an off-the-shelf
domestic PC, equipped with a graphics processor costing a
significant fraction of the price of the supercomputers of the
1990s.
As illustrated earlier, VR both “peaked and troughed” in the
1990s, for a variety of commercial, technical and human-centred
reasons. Commercial naïvety on the part of VR companies,
significant failures to deliver meaningful and usable intellectual
property on the part of so-called academic “centres of
excellence”, expensive and unreliable hardware, an absence of
case studies with cost-benefit analyses and a widespread
absence of attention to the requirements and limitations of the
end users all took their toll by the end of the 1990s 6 .
Yet, despite the failure of VR to deliver, today’s interactive 3D
users – those equipped with conventional computer equipment
– are beginning to benefit from the products of a stronglyfocused,
market-driven movement – one that was originally
10
Figure 3: Defence and
automotive engineering
applications of HMD and
CAVE technologies.
Source: Author’s Image Archive
labelled as technically and academically inferior by the proponents and purists of VR. That
community is the gaming community – home to graphics hardware manufacturers such as nVidia
and ATI, and “populated” with entrepreneurs and programmers responsible for such memorable
First-Person/Third-Person Shooter (FPS/TPS) and Role-Playing Game (RPG) titles as Delta Force,
Operation Flashpoint, Medal of Honor, Half-Life, FarCry and Crysis and Assassin’s Creed, to
mention but a few.
5 Cave Automatic Virtual Environment – a registered trademark of the University of Illinois – describes a roomlike
enclosure comprising back-projected video walls exposing occupants to virtual environments, edgeblended
to create seamless wrap-around presentations.
6 Stone, R.J. (2004), “Whatever Happened to Virtual Reality?”, Information Professional, October/November,
2004, Institute of Electrical Engineers (IEE; now Institute of Engineering & Technology - IET), 12-15.