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As applications for virtual reality (VR) and augmented reality (AR) technology increase, it will be important to understand how users perceive their action capabilities in virtual environments. Feedback about actions may help to calibrate perception for action opportunities (affordances) so that action judgments in VR and AR mirror actors’ real abilities. Previous work indicates that walking through a virtual doorway while wielding an object can calibrate the perception of one’s passability through feedback from collisions. In the current study, we aimed to replicate this calibration through feedback using a different paradigm in VR while also testing whether this calibration transfers to AR. Participants held a pole at 45°and made passability judgments in AR (pretest phase). Then, they made passability judgments in VR and received feedback on those judgments by walking through a virtual doorway while holding the pole (calibration phase). Participants then returned to AR to make posttest passability judgments. Results indicate that feedback calibrated participants’ judgments in VR. Moreover, this calibration transferred to the AR environment. In other words, after experiencing feedback in VR, passability judgments in VR and in AR became closer to an actor’s actual ability, which could make training applications in these technologies more effective.
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The Perception of Affordances in Mobile Augmented Reality
Today, augmented reality (AR) is most easily experienced through a mobile device such as a modern smartphone. For AR to be useful for applications such as training, it is important to understand how people perceive interactions with virtual objects presented to them via mobile AR. In this paper, we investigated two judgments of action capabilities (affordances) with virtual objects presented through smartphones: passing through an aperture and stepping over a gap. Our goals were to 1) determine if people can reliably scale these judgments to their body dimensions or capabilities and 2) explore whether cues presented in the context of the action could change their judgments. Assessments of perceived action capabilities were made in a pre/post-test design in which observers judged their affordances towards virtual objects prior to seeing an AR cue denoting their body dimension/capability, while viewing the cue, and after seeing the cue. Different patterns of results were found for the two affordances. For passing through, estimates became closer to shoulder width in the post-cue compared to the pre-cue block. For gap stepping, estimates were closer to actual stepping capability while viewing the cue, but did not persist when the cue was no longer present. Overall, our findings show that mobile smartphones can be used to assess perceived action capabilities with virtual targets and that AR cues can influence the perception of action capabilities in these devices. Our work provides a foundation for future studies investigating perception with the use of mobile AR with smartphones.
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- Award ID(s):
- 1763966
- PAR ID:
- 10404230
- Date Published:
- Journal Name:
- SAP '21: ACM Symposium on Applied Perception 2021
- Page Range / eLocation ID:
- 1 to 10
- 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
- Conference Paper:
- https://doi.org/10.1145/3474451.3476239
