3
COMSLIVE Project: Student Testing Session 1: 8/3/2010
Aims
Introduce nursing students to the Open Wonderland platform and collect feedback on their experiences.
Find any problems with the system itself, and any problems with how students use the platform.
Monitor system load in order to assess scalability.
Method
The 13 students will be split into three groups, labelled red, green and blue. The groups will share the same space, but be tasked with different activities.
One group will assess a patient and make a telephone call to a ‘doctor’, another group will do an information gathering exercise, and the third group will perform an orientation exercise.
The group members will be physically separated so that they use in-world voice chat to communicate. We will use 4 laptops in 251 and 8 laptops in the library, with one student in the office.
The students will be given a workbook with detailed instructions on each of the three tasks, and will be told which task to complete. It was initially planned that they do all three tasks, but due to time constraints it was decided that they only complete one.
At the end of the session there will be a group discussion to gather feedback, with the addition of a written questionnaire.
Client Specification
Toshiba Laptop:
Processor / Intel Core Duo CPU T9400@ 2.53GHz 2.53GHzInstalled RAM / 3.00GB
Sys Type / 32-bit Operating sys
Operating sys / Win 7
Video Card / ATI Mobility Radeon HD 3400 Series
Staff PC:
Processor / Intel Core i7 CPU 930@ 2.80GHz 2.80GHzInstalled RAM / 3.24 GB
Sys Type / 64-bit Operating sys
Operating sys / Windows XP Pro 32 bit
Video Card / NVIDIA GeForce GTS 250 (1GB)
Hard drive / 300GB
Results and Analysis
Some of the students did not like being ‘dropped straight into the world’ and they all would have preferred a proper orientation course to get used to controlling their avatar and interacting with the world.
They enjoyed the communication that was possible with the system, commenting that it helped them work as a team, and allowed them discuss any issues. They found that they were able to help each other if any of their team had problems, which decreased the time needed to familiarise themselves with the platform and helped them improve their communication skills.
It appeared that the students did not read the instructions in the workbook sufficiently which led to them sometimes not knowing what to do, or how to do an activity. The team discussed this and have decided that instructions need to be more integrated, which will be done by having any important information on posters in-world, rather than in a workbook.
Using Open Wonderland with the touchpad on the laptops caused frustration, and the students indicated that they would prefer to use mice which we will get for the next test.
When team members are physically close together, communication can get confusing. This is due to the fact that the real sound of their voice is heard slightly before the VoIP, and also because one doesn’t know whether to look at the team member, or at their avatar. For future test it will be best to make sure team members are split up and not sat together.
The students would have liked to have been able to talk to the patient, in order to assess him.
They also wanted their communications to be assessed by someone in-world, in order to make sure they are improving their communication skills.
The server’s statistics show that it used at most 12.16Mbs-1 of bandwidth, which is only 1.22% of its gigabit link.
The CPU was stable and less than 2.5% utilised.
Figure 1: The bandwidth graph for world node.
Figure 2: The bandwidth graph for SAS.
Client Bandwidth based on 13 users:
Inbound (upload bandwidth) / Outbound (download bandwidth used)WhiteRabbit / 0.5176923 Mbs-1
248.49 MB/min / 0.9353846 Mbs-1
448.98 MB/min
With SAS / 0.6053846 Mbs-1
290.58 MB/min / 3.7338461 Mbs-1
1792.25 MB/min