Distance Compression in the HTC Vive Pro: A Quick Revisitation of Resolution

Abstract

Spatial perception in immersive virtual environments, particularly regarding distance perception, is a well-studied topic in virtual reality literature. Distance compression, or the underestimation of distances, is and has been historically prevalent in all virtual reality systems. The problem of distance compression still remains open, but recent advancements have shown that as systems have developed, the level of distance compression has decreased. Here, we add evidence to this trend by beginning the assessment of distance compression in the HTC Vive Pro. To our knowledge, there are no archival results that report any findings about distance compression in this system. Using a familiar paradigm for studying distance compression in virtual reality hardware, we asked users to blind walk to a target object placed in a virtual environment and assessed their judgments based on those distances. We find that distance compression in the HTC Vive Pro mirrors that of the HTC Vive. Our results are not particularly surprising, considering the nature of the differences between the two systems, but they lend credence to the finding that resolution does not affect distance compression. More extensive study should be performed to reinforce these results.

Distance Perception in the Oculus Quest and Oculus Quest 2

“…Although there are many technological differences between the Quest and Quest 2, the most salient is the difference in resolution (1,440 by 1,600 in the Quest and 1832 by 1920 in the Quest 2). The current results suggest that resolution is not the limiting factor, corroborating similar conclusions from other research (Willemsen and Gooch, 2002;Thompson et al, 2004;Buck et al, 2021).…”

“…The primary independent variable was the viewing condition: real world, Quest, or Quest 2. The primary hypothesis was that distance perception would be more accurate in the real world compared to the Quest and Quest 2, based on research showing that perceived distance is typically less than 100%, even in modern displays (Aseeri et al, 2019;Buck et al, 2018Buck et al, , 2021Creem-Regehr et al, 2015b;Ding et al, 2020;Kelly et al, 2017;Li et al, 2015;Peer and Ponto, 2017). Comparison between the two HMDs was exploratory, since it was unclear whether technical differences between the displays should affect perceived distance.…”

The influence of affective voice on sound distance perception

“…On the first glance, this seems to be at odds with previous findings which typically show an underestimation of auditory distances for sound sources farther than 2 meters (Kolarik et al, 2016;Zahorik et al, 2005). Crucially, however, the present study was conducted in Virtual Reality and for virtual environments employing visual rendering via HMDs, distance compression effects have been shown where visual distances in virtual reality are perceived as smaller than in real environments (Buck et al, 2021;Renner et al, 2013). In light of the present study, this means that when a specific distance is determined based on auditory cues, the distance will then have to be transformed to the visual space during placement resulting in an overestimation of distances.…”

“…Previous studies have also argued that visual information is used to calibrate the auditory space (Kolarik et al, 2017). Interestingly, a compression factor of 0.6 has been described for the Vive Pro HMD (the HMD used in the present study, Buck et al, 2021) which would mean that setting a "heard" distance of 1.5 m would result in 2.5 m estimates in VR, i.e. an overestimation of 1m.…”

Perceiving distance in virtual reality: theoretical insights from contemporary technologies

“…Another striking improvement in modern HMDs is the increase in their FOV. Although real-world restrictions of FOV do not greatly affect distance estimates ([29,30,33], but see [99]), manipulations of FOV within and across newer HMDs suggest that FOV is an important factor for distance perception in VEs [31,32,35,43,[100][101][102][103][104][105][106][107]. Why would larger fields of view affect distance perception?…”