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11 Evaluation of Synthetic Environment Systems
Pages 373-378

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From page 373...
... (For simplicity, and unless stated otherwise, we use the term system here to refer to components and subsystems of SE systems as well as to complete SE systems.) Once a design has been chosen, evaluation studies can be used to diagnose problems and suggest alternative approaches.
From page 374...
... Under certain conditions, evaluations can be conducted without any empirical work at all and be based solely on theoretical analyses, for example, when appropriate models are available for describing all relevant components and performance can be reliably estimated solely by human or machine computation. A third dimension concerns the extent to which the item being evaluated constitutes a whole system or just one of the components in the system of interest.
From page 375...
... General background on types and methods of evaluation can be found in Meister (1985~. SPECIAL ISSUES IN SE EVALUATION As discussed throughout this book, the creation of SE systems draws on previous work in, and provides research and development challenges to, a wide variety of established disciplines, including computer science, electrical and mechanical engineering, sensorimotor psychophysics, cognitive psychology, and human factors.
From page 376...
... should be measured and compared with the sensorimotor capabilities of humans as determined from psychophysical studies. Ideally, some kind of metric of physical fidelity should be developed that takes account not only of the fidelity that exists in all the relevant sensorimotor channels, but also of the extent to which this fidelity falls short of the maximally useful fidelity and of the implications of this shortfall for overall system performance.
From page 377...
... . Beyond examining stored SE records, evaluation of human behavior in the SE can make use of supplementing information derived from external observations and measurements.
From page 378...
... However, it is important that they be seriously addressed by some group. In general and as a consequence of the many special features associated with SE evaluation, as well as the current tendency to ignore evaluation in the SE field, the committee believes that it would be extremely useful to develop a special evaluation tool kit for this field.


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