322 subjects participated in an experimental study to investigate the effects of tactile, olfactory, audio and visual sensory cues on a participant's sense of presence in a virtual environment and on their memory for the environment and the objects in that environment.Results strongly indicate that increasing the modalities of sensory input in a virtual environment can increase both the sense of presence and memory for objects in the environment. In particular, the addition of tactile, olfactory and auditory cues to a virtual environment increased the user's sense of presence and memory of the environment. Surprisingly, increasing the level of visual detail did not result in an increase in the user's sense of presence or memory of the environment.

The normal effects of aging include some decline in cognitive, perceptual, and motor abilities. This can have a negative effect on the performance of a number of tasks, including basic pointing and selection tasks common to today's graphical user interfaces. This paper describes a study of the effectiveness of two interaction techniques: area cursors and sticky icons, in improving the performance of older adults in basic selection tasks. The study described here indicates that when combined, these techniques can decrease target selection times for older adults by as much as 50°/0 when applied to the most difficult cases (smallest selection targets).At the same time these techniques are shown not to impede performance in cases known to be problematical for related techniques (e.g., differentiation between closely spaced targets) and to provide similar but smaller benefits for younger users.