Usability Challenges in Surgical Simulator Training

Surgical virtual reality simulators have been taken into use in order to improve surgical skills training. Emergence of simulators increases the need for research and knowledge related to usability of medical simulators. In this study usability of laparoscopic surgical simulator was researched experimentally through combined analysis. Data was gathered with heuristic evaluation, questionnaires, and interviews as well as recorded simulator parameters. Results suggest that the surgical simulator could be more efficient learning and training tool if usability issues such as support and error prevention were reconsidered in more detail. There also seem to be grounds for connecting user support …

Visually Perceived Distance Judgments: Tablet-Based Augmented Reality Versus the Real World

Does visually perceived distance differ when objects are viewed in augmented reality (AR), as opposed to the real world? What are the differences? These questions are theoretically interesting, and the answers are important for the development of many tablet- and phone-based AR applications, including mobile AR navigation systems. This article presents a thorough literature review of distance judgment experimental protocols, and results from several areas of perceptual psychology. In addition to distance judgments of real and virtual objects, this section also discusses previous work in measuring the geometry of virtual picture space and considers how this work might be relevant to tablet A…

Lost or not? : designing and evaluating user interfaces of mobile map services : the viewpoint of supporting users' location awareness

The motivation for this thesis arose from the problem of people getting lost, both with and without mobile maps. I will answer a primary research question: 1) How can we support users’ location awareness with mobile map applications? As an ad-dition to this, I have the following sub-questions: a) Why do people get lost even when using a mobile map application? b) What are the best practices to support navigation? c) How can we research what the important objects in the natural environment are that should be emphasized in mobile maps? d) How do we prevent the user from focusing on the map service at the expense of perceiving the location in the real environment? e) What would a good mobile m…

Depth perception in tablet-based augmented reality at medium- and far-field distances

Current augmented reality (AR) systems often fail to indicate the distance between the user and points of interest in the environment. Empirical evaluations of human depth perception in AR settings compared to real world settings are needed. Our goal in this study was to understand tablet-based AR depth perception by comparing it with real-world depth perception.

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