Compensating for Distance Compression in Audiovisual Virtual Environments Using Incongruence

Abstract

A key requirement for a sense of presence in Virtual Environments (VEs) is for a user to perceive space as naturally as possible. One critical aspect is distance perception. When judging distances, compression is a phenomenon where humans tend to underestimate the distance between themselves and target objects (termed egocentric or absolute compression), and between other objects (exocentric or relative compression). Results of studies in virtual worlds rendered through head mounted displays are striking, demonstrating significant distance compression error. Distance compression is a multisensory phenomenon, where both audio and visual stimuli are often compressed with respect to their distances from the observer. In this paper, we propose and test a method for reducing crossmodal distance compression in VEs. We report an empirical evaluation of our method via a study of 3D spatial perception within a virtual reality (VR) head mounted display. Applying our method resulted in more accurate distance perception in a VE at longer range, and suggests a modification that could adaptively compensate for distance compression at both shorter and longer ranges. Our results have a significant and intriguing implication for designers of VEs: an incongruent audiovisual display, i.e. where the audio and visual information is intentionally misaligned, may lead to better spatial perception of a virtual scene.

An approach to reducing distance compression in audiovisual virtual environments

“…All temporal properties of the stimuli remain unaffected, simply their spatial alignment is changed. This idea has been previously applied by Finnegan et al in a simple abstract environment with minimal distance cues [9]. We test whether the effect holds true in natural, cue rich environments.…”

“…In implementing their redirected walking technique, Steinicke et al found that distances can also be modified in the virtual environment so that they don't match the physical world, yet are perceptually veridical to the user [26]. Finnegan et al found a similar effect with incongruent audiovisual environments, where the variance of the point of subjective equality (PSE) was as great as 0.5 meters when audio and visual stimuli were misaligned [9]. Their incongruence function determines the position of an audio source given a visual anchor as in Equation 2.…”

“…The task was to match the position of a car horn to the spatial position of a target car. Spatial audio was implemented using the same custom plugin written for the Unity Game Engine used by Finnegan et al [9]. The plugin is publicly available for download: [https://github.com/Ps2Fino/ Unity-Audio-Plugin].…”

Towards the Design of Effective Haptic and Audio Displays for Augmented Reality and Mixed Reality Applications

“…For instance, by encoding the distance information in an audio display, the localization accuracy of AR medical applications can be significantly improved [16]. Audio feedback can also affect the user's understanding of visual space, and deliberately misaligned audio and visual information may lead to better perception of space in virtual scenes [17]. In addition, audio design can also serve as the primary interface for the transmission of game information and create engaging gaming experiences in location-based AR games [18].…”

Bayesian method for intent prediction in pervasive computing environments

“…相比 于其他方法, Bayes 方法针对较小的样本, 能产生更加准确的结果, 而且能在结果之外, 同时计算出结 果的置信度和显著性 [45] . 在实践中, Bayes 方法常用于各种分类 (如文本输入 [2,46,47] ) 和回归 (如推断用户的认知模型 [48] 、 提升感知深度的准确性 [49] ) 问题中.…”