A virtual environment for conceptual design in architecture
EGVE '03 Proceedings of the workshop on Virtual environments 2003
VR '03 Proceedings of the IEEE Virtual Reality 2003
Distance Perception in Immersive Virtual Environments, Revisited
VR '06 Proceedings of the IEEE conference on Virtual Reality
Minification influences spatial judgments in virtual environments
APGV '06 Proceedings of the 3rd symposium on Applied perception in graphics and visualization
Presence: Teleoperators and Virtual Environments
A full-body avatar improves egocentric distance judgments in an immersive virtual environment
Proceedings of the 5th symposium on Applied perception in graphics and visualization
The effect of self-embodiment on distance perception in immersive virtual environments
Proceedings of the 2008 ACM symposium on Virtual reality software and technology
Transitional environments enhance distance perception in immersive virtual reality systems
Proceedings of the 6th Symposium on Applied Perception in Graphics and Visualization
A first person avatar system with haptic feedback
Proceedings of the 17th ACM Symposium on Virtual Reality Software and Technology
Realistic perspective projections for virtual objects and environments
ACM Transactions on Graphics (TOG)
Proceedings of the ACM SIGGRAPH Symposium on Applied Perception in Graphics and Visualization
Proceedings of the ACM SIGGRAPH Symposium on Applied Perception in Graphics and Visualization
ACM Transactions on Applied Perception (TAP)
Proceedings of the ACM Symposium on Applied Perception
Stepping off a ledge in an HMD-based immersive virtual environment
Proceedings of the ACM Symposium on Applied Perception
The perception of egocentric distances in virtual environments - A review
ACM Computing Surveys (CSUR)
| Hi-index | 0.00 |
Previous work has shown that giving a user a first-person virtual avatar can increase the accuracy of their egocentric distance judgments in an immersive virtual environment (IVE). This result provides one of the rare examples of a manipulation that can enable improved spatial task performance in a virtual environment without potentially compromising the ability for accurate information transfer to the real world. However, many open questions about the scope and limitations of the effectiveness of IVE avatar self-embodiment remain. In this paper, we report the results of a series of four experiments, involving a total of 40 participants, that explore the importance, to the desired outcome of enabling enhanced spatial perception accuracy, of providing a high level of geometric and motion fidelity in the avatar representation. In these studies, we assess participants' abilities to estimate egocentric distances in a novel virtual environment under four different conditions of avatar self-embodiment: a) no avatar; b) a fully tracked, custom-fitted, high fidelity avatar, represented using a textured triangle mesh; c) the same avatar as in b) but implemented with single point rather than full body tracking; and d) a fully tracked but simplified avatar, represented by a collection of small spheres at the raw tracking marker locations. The goal of these investigations is to attain insight into what specific characteristics of a virtual avatar representation are most important to facilitating accurate spatial perception, and what cost-saving measures in the avatar implementation might be possible. Our results indicate that each of the simplified avatar implementations we tested is significantly less effective than the full avatar in facilitating accurate distance estimation; in fact, the participants who were given the simplified avatar representations performed only marginally (but not significantly) more accurately than the participants who were given no avatar at all. These findings suggest that the beneficial impact of providing users with a high fidelity avatar self-representation may stem less directly from the low-level size and motion cues that the avatar embodiment makes available to them than from the cognitive sense of presence that the self-embodiment supports.