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Cybersickness is a known issue in virtual reality affecting a notable percentage of the populations. However, predicting the level and incidence of cybersickness in new systems is difficult. Past publications were analyzed for their factors and resulting cybersickness scores. These factors were then used to develop three predictive models using demographics, software, and hardware factors. Using demographic information alone explained 44.2% of the adjusted variance in a linear model. Using hardware and software factors alone explained 55.3% of the adjusted variance in a linear model. Using demographics, software, and hardware factors did not use a linear model, but rather had an average residual error of 1.03. This residual error is an estimate of how far the predicted cybersickness score is from the actual score.

Educational games have found use in the classroom environment, and research suggests that well-designed games have motivational and educational benefits. But often games are individually crafted to fill a need in a specific assignment with no relation to other parts of the course or any other games used to assist teaching in the course. We are examining the question of whether or not educational content in a game tied more closely together through a common narrative is beneficial to student motivation to complete the educational content. To investigate this, we have developed a game with a common narrative to tie together a set of assignments in a circuitry course to then compare to the same set of assignments spread across three games containing different narratives.

The purpose of this article is to illustrate innovations in text analysis associated with understanding conflict-related communication events. Two innovations will be explored: LIWC (Linguistic Inquiry and Word Count), the text modeling program from the open-source data analysis software program R, and SPSS Modeler. The LIWC analysis revisits the 2009 study by Donohue and Druckman and the 2014 study by Donohue, Liang, and Druckman focusing on text analyses of the Oslo I Accords between the Palestinians and Israelis to illustrate this approach. The R and SPSS modeling of text analysis use the same data set as the LIWC analysis to provide a different set of pictures associated with each leader’s rhetoric during the period in which the Oslo I accords were being negotiated. Each innovation provides different insights into the mind-set of the two groups of leaders as the secret talks were emerging. The implications of each approach in establishing an understanding of the communication exchanges are discussed to conclude the article.

The field of Sonification has led to a variety of projects aimed at conveying graphical information via audition. Most of these projects are aimed at specific domains or contexts, and few have studied general audio presentation techniques empirically. This paper details the results of a multipart study of user perception of selected audio stimuli as users are asked to interpret those stimuli as points in a generic Cartesian space. Results will be used in future work designing methods of portraying technical drawings such as flowcharts and UML via audio.