Handbook of Virtual Environments

Dr. Kelly S. Hale is Sr. Vice President of Technical Operations at Design Interactive, Inc., a woman-owned small business focused on human-systems integration, which she joined in 2004. Her research and development efforts in human systems integration across areas of virtual environment design and evaluation, augmented cognition, multimodal interaction and haptic interfaces, and training sciences. She holds a patent for a tactile display language, and serves on the Editorial Board for the International Journal of Human-Computer Interaction, and Theoretical Issues in Ergonomics Science. She has received funding from the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA), Office of Naval Research (ONR), Intelligence Advanced Research Projects Activity (IARPA), Department of Homeland Security (DHS), National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA), and Department of the Army. Through these efforts, Kelly and her team have developed advanced neurophysiological measurement techniques, including a patent-pending Fixation-locked Event-Related Potentials (FLERPs) approach to capture electroencephalography ERP data in a naturalistic setting, and have advanced real-time mitigation strategy framework and induction techniques to optimize training, situation awareness, decision making, and operational performance through optimization of user cognitive and physical state within simulated training environments. In addition, Kelly has guided Design Interactive, Inc. to be a leader in developing advanced performance metrics and diagnostic capabilities, including behavioral, physiological and neural metric suites for capturing traditionally unobservable' behavioral data to evaluate perceptual skills and cognitive processing in real-time by synchronizing data with system events/areas of interest dynamically throughout simulated scenarios.

"A key attraction of this text is the diversity of chapter offerings that span a range of successful research and applications in academia, industry, defense, medicine, and education. A second aspect that is very important is the discussion and interplay of the science of learning and applications of virtual environments as well as the underpinning of theory and research in each chapter. I find this interplay to be very important regardless as a means of informing both science and practice along the way."—Dr Winston "Wink" Bennett, Jr., US Air Force Research Laboratory, Warfighter Readiness Research Division

• Introduction. System Requirements. Design Approaches and Implementation Strategies. Health and Safety Issues. Evaluation. Selected Applications of Virtual Environments.