Environmental Engineering Reference
In-Depth Information
in each one of the training trials. Figure 18 shows that in the trial 1, in which the participants of
both groups had just to use the information about the task in order to build the virtual model,
the training time of the direct aids group was almost the half of the time of the indirect aids
group (12.8 minutes in comparison with 22.5 minutes). And in the trials 3 and 4, although
the participants of the direct aids group had the constraint of having to make an attempt of
grasping the correct brick before being able to receive the aid, their training time was very
similar to the time of the indirect aids group, in which the participants did not have this
restriction. All these considerations indicate that a suitable use of direct aids can increase the
efficiency of the training process since it could reduce the training time and maintain the same
performance level.
Fig. 17. Total training time at each experimental group.
Fig. 18. Evolution of the time along the four training sessions
At the end of the training sessions all participants filled in a questionnaire, which was
a reduced version of Witmer & Singer 's Presence Questionnaire (Witmer & Singer (1998)).
Since the haptic technologies provide a new interaction paradigm, this set of questions was
useful to get extra information about the experience with the haptic training platform. The
questionnaire consisted of 8 main semantic differential items, each giving a score in the scale
from 1 (worst) to 7 (best).The questionnaire was elicited by the following questions:
• Q1. How natural was the mechanism which controlled movement
through the
environment? (Extremely artificial = 1, Natural = 7).
