Transitional Environments Enhance Distance Perception in Immersive Virtual Reality Systems
Proceedings of the ACM Symposium on Applied Perception in Graphics and Visualization (APGV), page 19--26 - 2009
Several experiments have provided evidence that ego-centric distances
are perceived as compressed in immersive virtual environments
relative to the real world. The principal factors responsible
for this phenomenon have remained largely unknown. However, recent
experiments suggest that when the virtual environment (VE) is
an exact replica of a user's real physical surroundings, the person's
distance perception improves. Furthermore, it has been shown that
when users start their virtual reality (VR) experience in such a virtual
replica and then gradually transition to a different VE, their
sense of presence in the actual virtual world increases significantly.
In this case the virtual replica serves as a transitional environment
between the real and virtual world.
In this paper we examine whether a person's distance estimation
skills can be transferred from a transitional environment to a different
VE. We have conducted blind walking experiments to analyze
if starting the VR experience in a transitional environment can improve
a person's ability to estimate distances in an immersive VR
system. We found that users significantly improve their distance
estimation skills when they enter the virtual world via a transitional
environment.
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BibTex references
@InProceedings{SBHLRI09, author = "Steinicke, Frank and Bruder, Gerd and Hinrichs, Klaus H. and Lappe, Markus and Ries, Brian and Interrante, Victoria", title = "Transitional Environments Enhance Distance Perception in Immersive Virtual Reality Systems", booktitle = "Proceedings of the ACM Symposium on Applied Perception in Graphics and Visualization (APGV)", pages = "19--26", year = "2009", publisher = "ACM Press", keywords = "virtual-portals", url = "http://basilic.informatik.uni-hamburg.de/Publications/2009/SBHLRI09" }