Navigating the Doctoral Labyrinth

The journey through a practitioner doctorate program to earn the terminal degree has been likened to a labyrinth with its complex maze or a mountain climb with its inherent obstacles and challenges the doctoral scholar must surpass to be successful. Reflexive positionality is a concomitant process which can be used throughout the practitioner doctorate to facilitate the iterative and recursive journey of the scholar-practitioner. Reflexivity facilitates an introspective process to elevate professional practitioners to scholar-practitioners and incorporate a reflexive view to transcend doctoral hurdles, attain the terminal degree, and return to practice to solve societal problems and problems within the discipline. Practitioner doctorate leadership may also be well served to incorporate reflexivity in the pedagogical redesign of the practitioner doctorate to strengthen the development and preparation of these scholar-practitioners.

Maze Terrain Authoring System in Immersive Virtual Reality for New Visual Realism

This paper proposes a maze terrain authoring system with which a user can automatically calculate various and complex maze patterns to compose maze terrains in an easier and more intuitive structure. Using the maze terrain information calculated by using the proposed authoring system, a 3D maze terrain is generated quickly and effectively, and through this, the user’s visual realism in an immersive virtual reality is increased to provide a new presence. The proposed maze terrain authoring system consists of three core functions: a function that automatically generates a grid maze of various sizes and patterns based on a maze generation algorithm; a function that calculates a circular maze in an intuitive structure; and a function that transforms a sketch-based maze by using an image-processing algorithm. Through the authoring system consisting of these functions, various maze terrains from uniform mazes to irregular mazes can be generated effectively. This study produces maze terrains of various concepts directly by using maze information calculated through the authoring system. In addition, through experiments, this study analyzes the efficiency in an immersive virtual reality and the presence through visual realism. In this process, the suitability of the authoring system is also analyzed in combination with a survey.