A Comparative Investigation of Assessment of Brain Activities in Immersive Visualization Environments

Abstract

The primary goal of this article is to comparatively investigate the assessment of brain activities in head-mounted and dome-shaped immersive visualization environments (IVE), consequently establishing a baseline for the effectiveness of objective assessment for immersive environments. Twelve college students were chosen at random to participate in the study. The investigation made use of electroencephalography (EEG) to measure the brain waves of the subjects with no outside stimuli. The researchers measured the activities of the subjects’ brainwaves using EEG in two different IVE systems. Two experiments were conducted in four sessions of five minutes each for two distinctly configured IVE systems. The preliminary analysis of collected data indicated that dome-shaped IVE system performed better than head-mounted IVE system. In most cases, subjects had a decline in activities of brain waves from baseline brain activities under the influence of an immersive relaxation scene. In rare instances, there were some subjects that showed extreme increases in brain activities. Since this is an extremely small sample, future study is under way to investigate a larger number of subjects and determine whether dome-shaped environment continue to show higher performance over head-mounted environment.