News & Notes

The Virtual Environments Technical Group (VETG) meeting was held at the HFES Annual Meeting in Houston, TX on September 29, 1999. Some of the main highlights of the meeting included:

Newsletter
According to HFES bylaws, we need to publish 3 newsletters/year to remain in the society. In order to help achieve the objective, a VETG newsletter editor is needed. Deborah Thompson has agreed to become newsletter editor.
There was some discussion about soliciting virtual environment related product manufacturers to serve as sponsors of the newsletter, which would also provide them a forum to market their products. This discussion, and the search for newsletter sponsors tabled until next meeting.

Old Business
Last year there was talk of a student design contest. There has been no movement on this, and the issue was declared dead.

VETG Taxonomy
The HFES is trying to develop a taxonomy of specialties in order to fairly identify experts within each technical group. Members who are interested in responding to requests can then identify themselves within this taxonomy. For the VETG, some of the following classifications of virtual environment expertise were suggested:
        Human Performance in Virtual Environments
        Health and Safety in Virtual Environments
        Social Implications of Virtual Environments

Discussion
The bulk of the meeting was devoted to unstructured discussion on how to generate more academic and industry interest in the HFES VETG. The few number of people in attendance at the meeting (approximately 10-12) was given as an example of the weakness of the group. The conversation also revolved around the perceived lack of applicability of VETG research to end users concerns, and that more applied research might better serve the interests of the group. Others believe that the pure research of the group should be left untouched, and that VETG should focus on referencing, documenting, and sending research findings into industry. Geb Thomas voiced a fear that VE/VR research would suffer the same fate as AI research in the early 90s: research promises to solve many problems, yet does not help solve the problems of the end user, so public interest wanes. Others discussed a need to distinguish VETG from other VE/VR groups (IEEE VR, SIGGRAPH, SIGCHI, etc.) as the group that specifically investigates human aspects and interactions with the VE/VR. A suggestion was for ‘joining forces’ with these other leading VE/VR research groups, perhaps staffing a booth at IEEE VR, SIGGRAPH, or SIGCHI.

The group agreed the taxonomy should be structured in way to address these concerns. “What are the areas of future development we want in the taxonomy?" Should contact individuals in VE/VR industry to discover where the research might be applied. Perhaps find sponsors (VE/VR product manufacturers) for the VETG, and investigate why they do not exhibit at the HFES conference, and what would be necessary to make the VETG, in general, and HFES as a whole, more relevant to their interests and needs.