Publications

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Cross Reality (XR) immersive environments offer challenges and opportunities in designing for cognitive aspects (e.g. learning, memory, attention, etc.) of information design and interactions. Information design is a multidisciplinary endeavor involving data science, communication science, cognitive science, media, and technology. In the present paper the holodeck metaphor is extended to illustrate how information design practices and some of the qualities of this imaginary computationally augmented environment (a.k.a. the holodeck) may be achieved in XR environments to support information-rich storytelling and real life, face-to-face, and virtual collaborative interactions. The Simulation Experience Design Framework & Method is introduced to organize challenges and opportunities in the design of information for XR. The notion of carefully blending both real and virtual spaces to achieve total immersion is discussed as the reader moves through the elements of the cyclical framework. A solution space leveraging cognitive science, information design, and transmedia learning highlights key challenges facing contemporary XR designers. Challenges include but are not limited to interleaving information, technology, and media into the human storytelling process, and supporting narratives in a way that is memorable, robust, and extendable.

People use social media resources like Twitter, Facebook, forums etc. to share and discuss various activities or topics. By aggregating topic trends across many individuals using these services, we seek to construct a richer profile of a person’s activities and interests as well as provide a broader context of those activities. This profile may then be used in a variety of ways to understand groups as a collection of interests and affinities and an individual’s participation in those groups. Our approach considers that much of these data will be unstructured, free-form text. By analyzing free-form text directly, we may be able to gain an implicit grouping of individuals with shared interests based on shared conversation, and not on explicit social software linking them. In this paper, we discuss a proof-of-concept application called Grandmaster built to pull short sections of text, a person’s comments or Twitter posts, together by analysis and visualization to allow a gestalt understanding of the full collection of all individuals: how groups are similar and how they differ, based on their text inputs.

People use social media resources like Twitter, Facebook, forums etc. to share and discuss various activities or topics. By aggregating topic trends across many individuals using these services, we seek to construct a richer profile of a person’s activities and interests as well as provide a broader context of those activities. This profile may then be used in a variety of ways to understand groups as a collection of interests and affinities and an individual’s participation in those groups. Our approach considers that much of these data will be unstructured, free-form text. By analyzing free-form text directly, we may be able to gain an implicit grouping of individuals with shared interests based on shared conversation, and not on explicit social software linking them. In this paper, we discuss a proof-of-concept application called Grandmaster built to pull short sections of text, a person’s comments or Twitter posts, together by analysis and visualization to allow a gestalt understanding of the full collection of all individuals: how groups are similar and how they differ, based on their text inputs.

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The object of the 'Enabling Immersive Simulation for Complex Systems Analysis and Training' LDRD has been to research, design, and engineer a capability to develop simulations which (1) provide a rich, immersive interface for participation by real humans (exploiting existing high-performance game-engine technology wherever possible), and (2) can leverage Sandia's substantial investment in high-fidelity physical and cognitive models implemented in the Umbra simulation framework. We report here on these efforts. First, we describe the integration of Sandia's Umbra modular simulation framework with the open-source Delta3D game engine. Next, we report on Umbra's integration with Sandia's Cognitive Foundry, specifically to provide for learning behaviors for 'virtual teammates' directly from observed human behavior. Finally, we describe the integration of Delta3D with the ABL behavior engine, and report on research into establishing the theoretical framework that will be required to make use of tools like ABL to scale up to increasingly rich and realistic virtual characters.

Ground Truth, a training game developed by Sandia National Laboratories in partnership with the University of Southern California GamePipe Lab, puts a player in the role of an Incident Commander working with teammate agents to respond to urban threats. These agents simulate certain emotions that a responder may feel during this high-stress situation. We construct psychology-plausible models compliant with the Sandia Human Embodiment and Representation Cognitive Architecture (SHERCA) that are run on the Sandia Cognitive Runtime Engine with Active Memory (SCREAM) software. SCREAM's computational representations for modeling human decision-making combine aspects of ANNs and fuzzy logic networks. This paper gives an overview of Ground Truth and discusses the adaptation of the SHERCA and SCREAM into the game. We include a semiformal descriptionof SCREAM. ©2008 IEEE.