Peripheral Stimulation and its Effect on Perceived Spatial Scale in Virtual Environments

Abstract

The following series of experiments explore the effect of static peripheral stimulation on the perception of distance and spatial scale in a typical head-mounted virtual environment. It was found that applying constant white light in an observer's far periphery enabled the observer to more accurately judge distances using blind walking. An effect of similar magnitude was also found when observers estimated the size of a virtual space using a visual scale task. The presence of the effect across multiple psychophysical tasks provided confidence that a perceptual change was, in fact, being invoked by the addition of the peripheral stimulation. These results were also compared to observer performance in a very large field of view virtual environment and in the real world. The subsequent findings raise the possibility that distance judgments in virtual environments might be considerably more similar to those in the real world than previous work has suggested.

Interaction and visual performance in stereoscopic displays: A review

“…One of the reasons for inaccuracy of distance judgment in VR compared with real‐world environment is the VR system's failure to provide complete distance cues that the real world present. However, a comprehensive list of distance cues that are provided by the real environment but missing in VR is not yet given in the literature . In a series of studies, Jones et al .…”

Perceiving Absolute Scale in Virtual Environments: How Theory and Application Have Mutually Informed the Role of Body-Based Perception

“…Physical properties of an HMD may influence the effective scale of virtual space, but this only partially accounts for the results that have been observed, and it is not yet known if the effect is on perception or on the actions used to measure perception (Willemsen, Colton, Creem-Regehr, & Thompson, 2009). Other suggestions have been made that cognitive effects, such as expectations or familiarity with room size, may affect the scaling of actions in VEs (Interrante, Anderson, & Ries, 2006;Interrante, Ries, Lindquist, & Anderson, 2007;Steinicke et al, 2009) or that additional peripheral environmental flow can improve performance, at least when blind walking is used as a response measure (Jones, Swan, & Bolas, 2013).…”

Minication affects action-based distance judgments in oculus rift HMDs

“…There are at least two different explanations for this result. First, there is some evidence that large field of view HMDs and light in the periphery can reduce distance the distance compression [Jones et al 2012;Jones et al 2013]. Second, our calibration technique was not thorough and has not been compared to more complex and objective calibration techniques involving calibrated cameras.…”

“…Therefore, little is known about how minification might affect larger field of view displays such as the Oculus Rift (110 • diagonal). There is some evidence that large field of view displays and light in the periphery may improve distance judgments in HMDs [Jones et al 2012;Jones et al 2013]. There are two primary goals of these experiments.…”