Instrumenting Moon and Mars Walks in Virtual Reality

Details

Supervisors

Vanderdonckt, Jean

Faculty

Louvain School of Management

Degree label

Master [60] en sciences de gestion
Master [60] en sciences de gestion

Abstract

Human spaceflight is returning to the Moon, and virtual reality combined with a weight-offloading device is an accepted, lower-cost way to give a trainee a first exposure to reduced-gravity walking. Whoever runs such an installation faces a prior question, one of management rather than of biomechanics: can the instruments already at hand support a decision, and with which limitations attached. This thesis answers it on an experiment at the Euro Space Center, in which 46 participants performed a there-and-back walk under a simulated lunar and a simulated Martian gravity in a spring-loaded offloading seat. Two low-cost sources reached the anal- ysis, that is 36 smartphone recordings of the seat’s inertial response and one questionnaire record per participant, covering distress and the sense of presence. A processing chain reproducible from raw file to reported number was built for each. The dynamics of the seat separate into two stable groups, recovered independently by a clustering of the channel statistics and by a trajectory reconstructed from the accel- eration. The reconstruction also locates the turn at the station from the seat signal alone. An item analysis identifies from the data the six mis-oriented items of the Presence Ques- tionnaire: reversing them raises its reliability from α = 0.831 to 0.893 and turns a null emotional–presence correlation into a significant negative one (r = −0.445, p = 0.003). Of the questions the data cannot answer, one follows from the instruments, and that is metric accuracy. The others follow from information that exists but was not available here, that is the gravity condition of each session, the correspondence between a recording and a participant, and the scoring key of a published instrument. The boundary of what such a setup supports is therefore set less by the instruments than by the information accompanying their output.