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Teleporting, or jumping, is a common method of moving through virtual environments. It provides a simple user interface, but deprives users of self-motion cues that are important to acquiring spatial knowledge. This paper examines one parameter of the teleportation interface, the teleportation or jump distance, and how that may affect spatial knowledge acquisition. We report the results of an experiment that examined the effects of two different, but fixed teleportation distances on how users could acquire knowledge of landmarks and routes. The results suggest that the teleport distance does not matter, hence teleportation as an interface is robust. However, use of teleportation resulted in significantly increased simulator sickness, a surprising result. 

Decades of research have shown that absolute egocentric distance is underestimated in virtual environments (VEs) when compared with the real world. This finding has implications on the use of VEs for applications that require an accurate sense of absolute scale. Fortunately, this underperception of scale can be attenuated by several factors, making perception more similar to (but still not the same as) that of the real world. Here, we examine these factors as two categories: (i) experience inherent to the observer, and (ii) characteristics inherent to the display technology. We analyse how these factors influence the sources of information for absolute distance perception with the goal of understanding how the scale of virtual spaces is calibrated. We identify six types of cues that change with these approaches, contributing both to a theoretical understanding of depth perception in VEs and a call for future research that can benefit from changing technologies. This article is part of the theme issue ‘New approaches to 3D vision’. 

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. 

Successful performance on the water-level task, a common measure of spatial perception, requires adopting an environmental, rather than object-centered, spatial frame of reference. Use of this strategy has not been systematically studied in prepubertal children, a developmental period during which individual differences in spatial abilities start to emerge. In this study, children aged 8 to 11 reported their age and gender, completed a paper-and-pencil water-level task, and drew a map of their neighborhood to assess spontaneous choice of spatial frame of reference. Results showed a surprising lack of age or gender difference in water-level performance, but a significant effect of spatial frame of reference. Although they made up only a small portion of the sample, children who drew allocentric maps had the highest water-level score, with very high accuracy. These results suggest that children who adopt environmental-based reference frames when depicting their familiar environment may also use environmental-based reference frame strategies to solve spatial perception tasks, thereby facilitating highly accurate performance.