Decision making in a virtual environment: effectiveness of a semi-immersive “Decision Theater” in understanding and assessing human-environment interactions

The Decision Theater (DT) at Arizona State University is a multimillion-dollar semiimmersive virtual environment facility purported to help policy makers and the larger community in making decisions about scientific issues and in visualizing output of predictive and scenario-based models. The DT has, like other virtual environments and related technology, generated interest and excitement, and its power is strengthened with evidence of its utility for the facilitation of scientific inquiry. We conducted a series of human-subjects tests with students, educators, and policy makers in which we evaluated the influence of the DT on aiding understanding, altering mental models, and correcting misconceptions. We compared responses of subjects saw a presentation about environmental issues in the DT to those of subjects that saw the same presentation on a flat screen in a classroom. We also compared, within subjects, a preand post-test, the differences between which address the degree to which the presentations influenced the subjects’ conceptions of the problems and the hypothetical decisions that they were asked to make. Preliminary analysis shows that some, but not all, of these dependent variables showed significant differences between groups, indicating a limited (but present) effect of the DT environment on decision making.