This post at Singularity Hub details an augmented reality tool developed for the Marine Corps that helps marines perform maintenance and repair an armored turret.
If you’re not familiar with the concept of augmented reality, think of it this way: instead of viewing reality directly (i.e. using your eyes), users view reality through a recording device. The recording device can be virtually any electronic device with a video camera on one side and a screen on the other, including basic consumer technology like mobile phones. The user points the camera at whatever they want to look at, and the device displays the live camera feed on the screen. What makes it “augmented” is that other information is added on top of the live feed. For example, a marine looks at a turret that needs repair, the computer inside the augmented reality device detects what the next step in the repair process is, and it adds annotations and sometimes videos to the video feed, which explain how to do whatever it is that the marine is trying to do.
Augmented reality is one of my personal research areas, but unfortunately, the tech is just too expensive for much research in psychology. Which, of course, is why this research was conducted by engineers.
But on the bright side, the tech is getting less expensive, and reasonably low-cost alternatives to traditional technologies are appearing up all the time. Just consider the $18,000 medical-grade balancing device that could be reasonably replaced by a $90 Wii Balance Board. Whenever I can get an augmented reality device for $100, the research shall begin!
An interesting article appeared in H Plus Magazine talking about the work of Dr. Byron Reeves, professor of communications at Stanford University. He suggests that the time is now for gaming to make its way into work, to make it interesting, accessible, and fun. He often uses analogies to World of Warcraft, where he says leadership is on display – individuals form and manage groups of hundreds of people to achieve team goals. He even goes so far as to suggest details about your online exploits might help you get a job in certain companies. I will definitely have to check out his book to investigate his views further.
The following video gives an introduction to some of the ideas that he talks about his book. It’s a little buzzword-heavy in the beginning, but he ends up presenting some really interesting ideas about the integration of gaming into work, as might be evidenced by the presentation title, “Work sucks – games are great.” Have a look – and if you’re interested, check out Vimeo for the rest of the series.
In the December 2009 issue of Current Directions in Psychological Science, Dye, Green and Bavelier1 set out to explore the positive benefits to video game playing on reaction times. It is well-accepted at this point that gamers have better reaction times than non-gamers – they respond more quickly to stimuli. The authors did not question this, but wanted to take it a step further by asking this question: Are regular gamers “trigger happy” – that is, have their reaction times improved by sacrificing accuracy? It is a stereotype that action gamers are more impulsive than others – but is that really the case?
In their compilation of recent research from their laboratory, the not-so-shocking answer is no, and there are two convincing pieces of evidence to this point:
- Regular video game players (those who self-reported playing 5 hours or more per week) had superior reaction times with no loss of accuracy compared to non-gamers.
- Non-regular video game players randomly assigned to 50 hours of play of Unreal Tournament or Call of Duty 2 (both high-intensity action games) over the course of 8 weeks had superior reaction times with no loss of accuracy compared to those assigned to play The Sims (a slow-paced life simulator), although the sample was small.
Either of these studies alone is not too convincing; the first is based on self-report data (and thus, “being a video gamer” could be correlated with intelligence, a natural propensity toward faster reaction times, or any other number of unmeasured variables) and the sample size for the second is limited (N = 25). But together, the picture they paint is quite compelling.
The implications of this are important. Directed video game training could be used at the high school level to improve hand-eye coordination for students with no detriment to their ability to process accurately. It also helps to quiet all those claims of “video games rot your brain.” It also has critical implications for adult training for jobs where reaction times are critical: firefighters, air traffic controllers, and military personnel, just to name a few.
And if a few hours of Call of Duty will help you survive, don’t you owe it to yourself to pick up a controller?
- Dye, M., Green, C., & Bavelier, D. (2009). Increasing Speed of Processing With Action Video Games Current Directions in Psychological Science, 18 (6), 321-326 DOI: 10.1111/j.1467-8721.2009.01660.x [↩]