I was highly involved in this project, taking on diverse tasks including drafting design documents, planning out the user experience, coding in C#, 3D modeling in Blender, and developing in Unity. I have assisted in running two rounds of qualitative usability studies. Results from the first round have been published in a Human Factors journal. The majority of our design decisions have been made in response to the usability studies or are backed up by literature on the subject. Alejandra Magaña’s Framework for Size and Scale Cognition has been an invaluable resource during our design process.

Background
When I joined the project, the team of professors had secured funding through NSF partially due to a prototype created by Grace Wonaphotimuke.

This project involves designing for two VR platforms: the Cave Automatic Virtual Enviornment (CAVE) and Head Mounted Display (HMD)

When designing the new version of the environment, the scheme was split up into 3 main sections

user interface: flat interactive elements

armatures: three-dimensional things which aren't entities

entities: three dimensional things like animals, stars, atoms, cells, etc. which are used as landmark things to measure

The way in which the user interacts with the environment was designed to mimic changing an exponent in scientific notation and moving decimal places in standard notation: concepts seen in American science and math curricula

Animation of decimal moving

Diagram of the numeric panel that the user interacs with

A variety of enivronment schema were designed in two or more ways and then put through user testing with user interface experts. Later testing will be done with general "non-expert" students.

the forest

the path