If one is to posit that virtual reality will be used to train humans in critical performance tasks, the key becomes finding what sort of training is transferable between the virtual and physical worlds. Experiments performed thus far in the CAVE Virtual Environment showed significant performance improvement in virtual reality-trained subjects compared to the untrained population for the same task. Further experiments will quantitatively assess what may be perhaps the most important aspect of virtual reality research--the relationship between the technology and the training task which would result in a maximum transfer of training. Early results indicate that latency is a severe problem and that restricting virtual reality solely to the visual domain limits its training application. This work will extend the study of latency measurement to wide area networks using CAVE-to-CAVE experiments over the vBNS national network as the model. The results are expected to have broad applicability in the National Challenge areas, particularly in manufacturing and education If one is to posit that virtual reality will be used to train humans in critical performance tasks, the key becomes finding what sort of training is transferable between the virtual and physical worlds. Experiments performed thus far in the CAVE Virtual Environment showed significant performance improvement in virtual reality-trained subjects compared to the untrained population for the same task. Further experiments will quantitatively assess what may be perhaps the most important aspect of virtual reality research--the relationship between the technology and the training task which would result in a maximum transfer of training. Early results indicate that latency is a severe problem and that restricting virtual reality solely to the visual domain limits its training application. This work will extend the study of latency measurement to wide area networks using CAVE-to-CAVE experiments over the vBNS national network as the model. The results are expected to have broad applicability in the National Challenge areas, particularly in manufacturing and education.
