Distance perception in real and virtual environments

Abstract

We conducted three experiments to compare distance perception in real and virtual environments. In Experiment 1, adults estimated how long it would take to walk to targets in real and virtual environments by starting and stopping a stopwatch while looking at a target person standing between 20 and 120 ft away. The real environment was a large grassy lawn in front of a university building. We replicated this scene in our virtual environment using a nonstereoscopic, large-screen immersive display system. We found that people underestimated time to walk in both environments for distances of 40 to 60 ft and beyond. However, time-to-walk estimates were virtually identical across the two environments, particularly when people made real environment estimates first. In Experiment 2, 10-and 12-year-old children and adults estimated time to walk in real and virtual environments both with and without vision. Adults underestimated time to walk in both environments for distances of 60 to 80 ft and beyond. Again, their estimates were virtually identical in the real and virtual environment both with and without vision. Twelve-yearolds' time-to-walk estimates were also very similar across the two environments under both viewing conditions, but 10-year-olds exhibited greater underestimation in the virtual than in the real environment. A third experiment showed that adults' time-towalk estimates were virtually identical to walking without vision. We conclude that distance perception may be better in virtual environments involving large-screen immersive displays than in those involving head-mounted displays (HMDS). • 217 • J. M. Plumert et al.

Perceiving simulated ego-motions in virtual reality: comparing large screen displays with HMDs

“…26 The only study we are aware of that found comparable distance estimation in real world and a VR replica was performed using a large, 270 • CAVE-like three-walled backprojection setup. 27 This lead Plumert, Kearney, and Cremer (2004) 27 to conclude that "distance perception may be better in virtual environments involving large screen immersive displays than those involving head mounted displays (HMDs)". A similar advantage of using a large projection system instead of an HMD was found in the turn execution studies of Experiments 1 and 2 of this manuscript and will be discussed in the following.…”

Validation of virtual reality as a tool to understand and prevent child pedestrian injury

“…Sitting atop of a stationary bicycle, children bike through a neighborhood and judge safety of a series of intersections. Initial data from that system targeted developmental change, and found that children delayed their initiation across safe gaps and took longer to cross traffic gaps than adults (Plumert et al, 2004(Plumert et al, , 2005(Plumert et al, , 2007. A second group used a headmounted display VR system to study pediatric pedestrian safety (Clancy et al, 2006;Simpson et al, 2003).…”

Comparing distance perception in different virtual environments

“…A number of investigations have attempted to explain this bias in behavior by examining technical aspects of VEs such as limited field of view, problems with binocular stereo in HMDs, quality of computer graphics and HMD mechanics (Knapp and Loomis 2004;Thompson et al 2004;Bingham et al 2001;William et al 2001;Creem-Regehr et al 2005), and some of them tried to evaluate also the usefulness of feedback in learning how to perceive distances (Mohler et al 2006). Some work has been done in this direction (Rolland et al 1994;Cutting 1997;Armbrüster et al 2008), but still there is no agreement on the reasons of this bias or on how it is possible to avoid it, even if there are some manipulations that is possible to enact in order to alleviate the problem (Waller and Richardson 2008), like presenting the environment on a large projection screen instead of an HMD (Plumert et al 2005), providing users with explicit feedback about their distance errors (Richardson and Waller 2005), or making the user undergo a period of familiarization and interaction with the environment before distance judgments (Mohler et al 2006;Richardson and Waller 2007 In different visualization systems, there are different perceptual cues, due to a different functioning of the visualization technologies (CAVE, Elbedom, Engineering Workstation, laptop), and therefore different information has to be processed during perception and by the cognitive system.…”