Difference between revisions of "Spaceship Shenanigans"

From TACWiki
Jump to: navigation, search
(Specifications)
m (Resource Detection System=)
Line 31: Line 31:
 
Sector d1 is a fills the player's visual field (1.78 degrees at a 50 cm viewing distance is 15.5 mm). This sector corresponds to the resource gatherer's control panel.
 
Sector d1 is a fills the player's visual field (1.78 degrees at a 50 cm viewing distance is 15.5 mm). This sector corresponds to the resource gatherer's control panel.
  
===Resource Detection System====
+
===Resource Detection System===
  
 
The d2 sectors make up the resource detection system of the resource gatherer. One of the d2 sectors will light up prior to the appearance of a peripheral stimulus as a cue to the corresponding d3 sector.
 
The d2 sectors make up the resource detection system of the resource gatherer. One of the d2 sectors will light up prior to the appearance of a peripheral stimulus as a cue to the corresponding d3 sector.
Line 46: Line 46:
 
Following the resource detection cue, a resource will appear in one of the d3 sectors.  
 
Following the resource detection cue, a resource will appear in one of the d3 sectors.  
  
The resource will slowly lose point value over time, disappearing over the duration of 6000 ms. A subtle particle effect will convey the resource as disintegrating.  
+
The resource will slowly lose point value over time, disappearing over the duration of 6000 ms. A subtle particle effect will convey the resource as disintegrating.
  
 
===Flashing===
 
===Flashing===

Revision as of 10:37, 4 July 2008

Summary

This game resembles the arcade game Missile Command. Tests focus on the Posner paradigm, distribution and shifting of attention, and the effect of multimodal (auditory and visual) stimuli.

Premise

The colony is in need of raw material resources. You are in control of the colony's Resource Gatherer. Use its tractor beam to collect as many resources as possible.

Objective

Collect as many resources as possible.

Characters

Colony Resource Gatherer

File:ComingSoon.png

Resource/Ore:

File:ComingSoon.png

Specifications

Game Screen

The game screen is a semi-circle divided into a central (d1) sector and 4 intermediate (d2) and peripheral (d3) sectors.

(image link)

Sector d1 is a fills the player's visual field (1.78 degrees at a 50 cm viewing distance is 15.5 mm). This sector corresponds to the resource gatherer's control panel.

Resource Detection System

The d2 sectors make up the resource detection system of the resource gatherer. One of the d2 sectors will light up prior to the appearance of a peripheral stimulus as a cue to the corresponding d3 sector.

The resource detection system is fallible. 20% of the time, it cues an incorrect sector.

This aspect of the task combines a variation of a centrally cued Posner attention paradigm (testing effects of cue validity and cue-target onset asynchrony) (Posner et al. 1987).

Resource Stimulus

The d3 sectors are monitors of outer space. (The diameter of sector d3 is currently equal to the width of the game screen - 800 px in the demo)

Following the resource detection cue, a resource will appear in one of the d3 sectors.

The resource will slowly lose point value over time, disappearing over the duration of 6000 ms. A subtle particle effect will convey the resource as disintegrating.

Flashing

(update this)

Gameplay

The player is inside the control room of the colony's resource gatherer.

There are two main tasks for the player:

1 - The player must respond, by pressing the Down arrow, when a bad ore is detected and displayed by the control panel.

2 - The player must respond, by pressing the Up arrow, when an ore appears in any of the d3 sectors.

Phases

The peripheral task runs in three phases:

Phase 1: 100% of the stimuli appearing in the sectors are targets.

Phase 2: The same targets appear, but they are interspersed in time and space with many distractors (however many make the game feel right). Distractors are equally salient as targets, but distinguishable.

Phase 3: Same as Phase 2 but targets are paired with an alerting sound. (Maybe this alerting sound could be the manifestation of a sensor upgrade that the player acquires when Phase 2 ends.)

Unimodal vs. Multimodal Phase

An system activates a stimulus in one of three different conditions of sensory modality:

Unisensory Visual

Multisensory Audiovisual

The arrow is accompanied by a klaxon (100 hz square wave modulated at 10 hz in synchrony with the arrow).

Unisensory Auditory

The klaxon alone.
If we were to go to two quadrants instead of four (i.e., placing the base at the bottom of the display instead of in the centre), we could perhaps use a monaural (left or right) klaxon to give some directional information, akin to the valid or invalid direction cue that's given by the arrow.
Would it be better to remove directional specificity from the test altogether to focus strictly on the multi-modal aspect?
I have thought about this, and on reflection, we can go with the plain, non-directional klaxon. It seems useful to "kill two birds with one stone," as it were, in getting both a Posner attention-shifting paradigm and a unimodal-multimodal paradigm out of the same single task, if we can pack both in.

This aspect of the task is a test of multimodal (audiovisual) integration. (Senkowski, Molholm, Gomez-Ramirez, Foxe)(auditory_visual_integration_2006.pdf)

Scoring

Cash is awarded for each resource collected. (The cash values will be determined along with the Colony Simulator design)