Measurement Protocols for Medium-Field Distance Perception in Large-Screen Immersive Displays

Abstract

How do users of virtual environments perceive virtual space? Many experiments have explored this question, but most of these have used head-mounted immersive displays. This paper reports an experiment that studied large-screen immersive displays at medium-field distances of 2 to 15 meters. The experiment measured egocentric depth judgments in a CAVE, a tiled display wall, and a real-world outdoor field as a control condition. We carefully modeled the outdoor field to make the three environments as similar as possible. Measuring egocentric depth judgments in large-screen immersive displays requires adapting new measurement protocols; the experiment used timed imagined walking, verbal estimation, and triangulated blind walking. We found that depth judgments from timed imagined walking and verbal estimation were very similar in all three environments. However, triangulated blind walking was accurate only in the outdoor field; in the large-screen immersive displays it showed underestimation effects that were likely caused by insufficient physical space to perform the technique. These results suggest using timed imagined walking as a primary protocol for assessing depth perception in large-screen immersive displays. We also found that depth judgments in the CAVE were more accurate than in the tiled display wall, which suggests that the peripheral scenery offered by the CAVE is helpful when perceiving virtual space.

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Document Details

Document Type
Technical Report
Publication Date
Mar 01, 2009
Accession Number
ADA606479

Entities

People

  • Eric A Klein
  • Gregory S. Schmidt
  • J. E. Swan Ii
  • Mark A. Livingston
  • Oliver G. Staadt

Organizations

  • United States Naval Research Laboratory

Tags

Communities of Interest

  • Air Platforms
  • Energy and Power Technologies
  • Materials and Manufacturing Processes

DTIC Thesaurus Topics

  • Abstracts
  • Augmented Reality
  • California
  • Computational Science
  • Electronic Mail
  • Graphics
  • Human Behavior
  • Human-Machine Interaction
  • Measurement
  • Mental Processes
  • Military Research
  • Observers
  • Perception
  • Standards
  • Universities
  • Virtual Reality
  • Visual Perception

Readers

  • Team-Based Human-Centered Cognitive Task Decision Making and Information Performance.
  • Vision Science/Vision Psychology/Cognitive Neuroscience.

Technology Areas

  • Space