Virtual research to continue at IU

The National Science Foundation has awarded $297,929 to a multidisciplinary team from IU and Arizona State University to continue conducting research concerned with the use of computer-generated 3-D virtual environments for business and educational enterprises.

Until 2013, the IU research team ­— Anne Massey, the project’s lead researcher and professor of information systems at the Kelley School of Business and Jeanne Johnston, assistant professor of kinesiology in the School of Health, Physical Education and Recreation — will continue the research with the new scale created during the NSF grant awarded in 2009 to measure perceptions of collaborative virtual presence and examine its link to performance.

“The National Science Foundation is very prestigious and they are very picky about the research that they support, so we are very, very pleased that they deemed the work that we are doing to have particular value to both business organizations and also have teaching and learning context, because virtual environments are increasingly used in online education among other areas,” Massey said.

For more than 20 years, Massey has been researching computer-mediated environments, particularly collaboration.

“I do a lot of work with international new product development teams,” she said. “They use technology to do most of their work and they use it for collaboration and communication purposes. 3-D environments are kind of what I consider the next-generation collaboration platform, so it is a natural progression of research to be looking at these kinds of environments.”

Massey said this is really a cross-disciplinary effort to tackle a relatively complex problem.

“We are trying to understand how 3-D virtual environments can drive performance of the people that are collaborating in them,” she said. “It is about developing ways and validating ways to measure presence in a 3-D environment and then show the link between presence and collaborative performance.”

“We are going to be looking at physiological measures such as heart rate, skin response, eye tracking techniques in addition to perceptual measures as we try to bring all of this together.”