About
50
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733
Citations
Citations since 2017
Introduction
Skills and Expertise
Additional affiliations
May 2019 - August 2019
August 2016 - May 2019
Position
- Research Assistant
Description
- Develope Virtual Reality applications and conduct spatial cognition research
May 2014 - May 2014
Position
- Staff Assistant
Description
- Android developer: Integrated location awareness with the display of distant landmarks to support mobile navigation in campus tunnels.
Education
August 2016 - May 2020
August 2014 - May 2016
September 2010 - June 2014
Publications
Publications (50)
The recent influx of remote and proximal sensing data provides new opportunities to understand environmental processes. A potential application of these datasets is to facilitate forestry operations. However, forest management decision-making through sensing techniques faces many challenges, partly due to the involvement of stakeholders with differ...
While different crowdsourcing platforms promote remote data collection, experiments in the immersive Virtual Reality (iVR) research community are predominantly performed in person. The COVID-19 pandemic, however, has forced researchers in different disciplines, including iVR, to seriously consider remote studies. In this paper, we present a remote...
Virtual field trips are transforming education in biology and other place-based disciplines – and not just since Covid-19 has imposed social distancing constraints. Efficient methods for content creation, combined with affordable immersive technology, provide the opportunity to integrate immersive experiences into ever-larger classes. However, many...
Accessibility and inclusivity in field geology have become increasingly
important issues to address in geoscience education and have long been set
aside due to the tradition of field geology and the laborious task of making
it inclusive to all. Although a popular saying among geologists is “the
best geologists see the most rocks”, field trips cost...
Virtual and immersive virtual reality, VR and iVR, provide flexible and engaging learning opportunities, such as virtual field trips (VFTs). Despite its growing popularity for education, understanding how iVR compared to non-immersive media influences learning is still challenged by mixed empirical results and a lack of longitudinal research. This...
Virtual and immersive virtual reality, VR and iVR, provide flexible and engaging learning opportunities, such as virtual field trips (VFTs). Despite its growing popularity for education, understanding how iVR compared to non-immersive media influences learning is still challenged by mixed empirical results and a lack of longitudinal research. This...
Although the COVID-19 pandemic has made the need for remote data collection more apparent than ever, progress has been slow in the virtual reality (VR) research community, and little is known about the quality of the data acquired from crowdsourced participants who own a head-mounted display (HMD), which we call crowdXR. To investigate this problem...
Reference frames provide structure for spatial cognition and support spatial knowledge development across different scales. This study sheds light on the relationship between geographic scale, defined as the spatial extent visually accessible from a single viewpoint, and the preferential use of different reference frames (egocentric vs. allocentric...
Accessibility and inclusivity in field geology have become increasingly important issues to address in geoscience education and have long been set aside due to the tradition of field geology and the laborious task of making it inclusive to all. Although a popular saying among geologists is “the best geologists see the most rocks”, field trips cost...
The synergies of advances in environmental sensing and modeling and the mainstreaming of immersive technologies lay the foundation for a theoretical grounding of embodied digital twins. Embodied digital twins draw on an established understanding of the importance of place for environmental sciences as well as a paradigmatic shift in the cognitive s...
![Figure 1: SENSATIUM (modified from [12])](profile/Mahda-Bagher/publication/352831882/figure/fig1/AS:1098374765907982@1638884359974/SENSATIUM-modified-from-12_Q320.jpg)
As projects become more globally dispersed, site visits and analysis become challenging, often leading to the use of secondary information (e.g., photos, plans, and videos). Immersive technology offers embodied , visual, and spatial perspectives, providing unique information about a site that could be beneficial. Our research examines how virtual e...
With immersive experiences becoming a medium for mass communication, we need pedagogies as well as scientific, evidence-based design principles for immersive learning. To foster evidence-based designs of immersive learning, we detail an empirical evaluation of a geosciences field trip, common in undergraduate education across numerous disciplines....
Background:
Investigating the relationship between the human body and its spatial environment is a critical component in understanding the process of acquiring spatial knowledge. However, few empirical evaluations have looked at how the visual accessibility of an environment affects spatial learning. To address this gap, this paper focuses on geog...
In this paper, we explore how the embodiment and gender of a virtual instructor can affect social presence, spatial presence, perceived learning effectiveness, and performance of students in virtual field trips. A pilot study with 22 students was conducted in the spring of 2020 in a geoscience course at The Pennsylvania State University. Our result...
Although immersive virtual reality is attractive to users, we know relatively little about whether higher immersion levels increase or decrease spatial learning outcomes. In addition, questions remain about how different approaches to travel within a virtual environment affect spatial learning. In this paper, we investigated the role of immersion (...
Field trips are a key component of learning in STEM disciplines such as geoscience to develop skills, integrate knowledge, and prepare students for lifelong learning. Given the reported success of technology-based learning and the prevalence of new forms of technology, especially with immersive virtual reality (iVR) entering the mainstream, virtual...
![Figure 1: SENSATIUM (modified from [12])](profile/Pejman-Sajjadi/publication/346583105/figure/fig1/AS:1185718894362624@1659708822069/SENSATIUM-modified-from-12_Q320.jpg)
Understanding the concept of strike and dip and taking measurements with a compass clinometer are critical in undergraduate geosciences education and research. Although imperative, it is well-documented that geosciences students often have difficulties understanding these concepts. Traditionally, measuring strike and dip is a hands-on activity that...
Remote and virtual learning experiences are on the rise in the geosciences and allied STEM fields---not just since the pandemic. Over the last years, we have developed a research framework for immersive virtual field trips (iVFTs) to systematically address conceptual questions and provide an evidence-based grounding of design choices. Our primary f...
The paper details the design and evaluation of a joint, multi-user immersive virtual field trip (iVFT). The setting for our work centers on academic disciplines that value place-based education. The reported user study is embedded into a developing research framework on place-based learning and the role immersive experiences play as supplement, pro...
The paper details the design and evaluation of a joint, multiuser immersive virtual field trip (iVFT). The setting for our work centers on academic disciplines that value place-based education. The reported user study is embedded into a developing research framework on place-based learning and the role immersive experiences play as supplement, prox...
Immersive technologies have the potential to overcome physical limitations and virtually deliver field site experiences, for example, into the classroom. Yet, little is known about the features of immersive technologies that contribute to successful place-based learning. Immersive technologies afford embodied experiences by mimicking natural embodi...
The value of field trips is undisputed across disciplines. Field-site visits whether in social or physical sciences provide grounding for place- and discovery-based learning. Yet field trips have limitations that can now be overcome by the promise of immersive technologies that can improve quality and accessibility. This promise is twofold: First,...
Immersive technologies have entered the mainstream. To establish them firmly in educational curricula requires both practical and empirical assessments that ultimately lead to best practice and design recommendations. We report on a study that contributes to both. To enrich geoscience education, we developed an immersive virtual field trip (iVFT) t...
The availability and quantity of remotely sensed and terrestrial geospatial data sets are on the rise. Historically, these data sets have been analyzed and quarried on 2D desktop computers; however, immersive technologies and specifically immersive virtual reality (iVR) allow for the integration, visualization, analysis, and exploration of these 3D...
Low-cost VR applications in our understanding are applications that run on inexpensive hardware, such as mobile solutions based on a combination of smartphone and VR viewer, and that can be created with relatively low costs, efforts, and VR expertise involved. We present our approach for creating such low-cost applications of real world places, dev...
Learning a second language (L2) presents a significant challenge to many people in adulthood. Platforms for effective L2 instruction have been developed in both academia and the industry. While real-life (RL) immersion is often lauded as a particularly effective L2 learning platform, little is known about the features of immersive contexts that con...
Libraries have been the key to preserving culture and historic legacy for centuries. One such treasure cataloged in The Pennsylvania State University (Penn State) Libraries is a collection of over 33,000 Sanborn™ Fire Insurance Maps. Originally kept safe in metal drawers, the library has embarked on a journey to digitize this abundance of informati...
Immersive technologies are now enabling better and more affordable immersive experiences, offering the opportunity to revisit their use in the architectural and landscape studio to gain site information. Considering when travel to a site is limited or not possible, immersive experiences can help with conveying site information by overcoming issues...
Low-cost consumer-level immersive solutions have the potential to revolutionize education and research in many fields by providing
virtual experiences of sites that are either inaccessible, too dangerous, or too expensive to visit, or by augmenting in-situ experiences
using augmented and mixed reality methods. We present our approach for creating l...
We present our work on creating and assessing virtual field trip experiences using different VR and AR setups. In comparative studies, we address the question of how different settings and technologies compare regarding their ability to convey different kinds of spatial information and to foster spatial learning. We focus on a case study on an info...
Immersive technologies provide novel ways to integrate data
with their context. This integration has brought tremendous opportunities
to blur the distinction between classroom-based formal
learning and informal learning in the outside world. Additionally,
the ability for virtual navigation to real world sites has
converged space and time. To furthe...
3D virtual reality (VR) technology has long promised to provide new ways to view and interact with abstract data, but it has been held back by technological limitations and the difficulty of moving through 3D environments. Recent innovations in VR technology overcome previous constraints, but existing research has had mixed insights into the optima...
Immersive technologies have the potential to significantly improve anddisruptively change the future of education and research. The representational oppor-tunities and characteristics of immersive technologies are so unique that only therecent development in mass access fostered by heavy industry investments will allowfor a large-scale assessment o...
While bringing portability and convenience to their users, the small screen size of mobile devices raises the concern that it might impact a user’s acquisition of spatial knowledge. Visualizing information of off-screen objects on mobile device has thus been introduced as a possible way to overcome this problem. Some approaches encode the distance...
Mobile phones have become so popular in navigation. Empirical studies, however, have implied several pitfalls of using these mobile systems. First of all, generated navigation guides with continuous routing information keep the users being mindless of the environment that impacts their acquisition of spatial knowledge. In addition, the small size o...
Questions
Question (1)
I have two sets of randomly generated data with the wrapped normal circular distribution. I would like to test for homogeneity of means between these two samples. I was considering using Watson-Williams test but it requires that the samples are drawn from populations with a von Mises distribution. Therefore, I am wondering if there is any two-sample test that can be applied to data with the wrapped normal distribution.
