drBOB Appelman
email at appelman@indiana.edu
voice at (812) 856-8456

The Game Play Analysis Laboratory (VX Lab) is situated in the Instructional Systems Technology Department within the School of Education at IUB. It has as its primary mission to understand the psycho, social, emotional, and cognitive levels of engagement during game play.

Even though this primary focus is on games, the actual analysis is more a focus on virtual learning environments since it is a long-term goal of the researchers to be able to generate virtual experiential game environments where excitement and engagement with content could be achieved.

The laboratory has the capability to test major console game platforms, such as Xbox, PlaystationII, Wii, and GameCube, as well as those run on a PC. It is equipped with two main testing stations that have full video and audio capture capabilities plus image and audio processing centers. These centers allow for multi-channel audio equalization and image special effects manipulation, such that audio and visual sources can be mixed onto one digital tape for data collection and analysis. This technology infrastructure allows for the capture of dynamic play data that may be analyzed from many points-of-view and with varying degrees of depth. Our researchers utilize qualitative and quantitative measures to broaden the potential of using this data for many research agendas.