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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. 

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’.