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Spatial perception in virtual reality (VR) has been a hot research topic for years. Most of the studies on this topic have focused on visual perception and distance perception. Fewer have examined auditory perception and room size perception, although these aspects are important for improving VR experiences. Recently, a number of studies have shown that perception can be calibrated to information that is relevant to the successful completion of everyday tasks in VR (such as distance estimation and spatial perception). Also, some recent studies have examined calibration of auditory perception as a way to compensate for the classic distance compression problem in VR. In this paper, we present a calibration method for both visual and auditory room size perception. We conducted experiments to investigate how people perceive the size of a virtual room and how the accuracy of their size perception can be calibrated by manipulating perceptible auditory and visual information in VR. The results show that people were more accurate in perceiving room size by means of vision than in audition, but that they could still use audition to perceive room size. The results also show that during calibration, auditory room size perception exhibits learning effects and its accuracy was greatly improved after calibration.
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Judgments of Object Size and Distance across Different Virtual Reality Environments: A Preliminary Study
Emerging technologies offer the potential to expand the domain of the future workforce to extreme environments, such as outer space and alien terrains. To understand how humans navigate in such environments that lack familiar spatial cues this study examined spatial perception in three types of environments. The environments were simulated using virtual reality. We examined participants’ ability to estimate the size and distance of stimuli under conditions of minimal, moderate, or maximum visual cues, corresponding to an environment simulating outer space, an alien terrain, or a typical cityscape, respectively. The findings show underestimation of distance in both the maximum and the minimum visual cue environment but a tendency for overestimation of distance in the moderate environment. We further observed that depth estimation was substantially better in the minimum environment than in the other two environments. However, estimation of height was more accurate in the environment with maximum cues (cityscape) than the environment with minimum cues (outer space). More generally, our results suggest that familiar visual cues facilitated better estimation of size and distance than unfamiliar cues. In fact, the presence of unfamiliar, and perhaps misleading visual cues (characterizing the alien terrain environment), was more disruptive than an environment with a total absence of visual cues for distance and size perception. The findings have implications for training workers to better adapt to extreme environments.
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- Award ID(s):
- 1928695
- PAR ID:
- 10356221
- Date Published:
- Journal Name:
- Applied Sciences
- Volume:
- 11
- Issue:
- 23
- ISSN:
- 2076-3417
- Page Range / eLocation ID:
- 11510
- Format(s):
- Medium: X
- Sponsoring Org:
- National Science Foundation
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- Free Publicly Accessible Full Text
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Accepted Manuscript1.0
- Journal Article:
- https://doi.org/10.3390/app112311510
