Affordances for Quantitative and Objective Measures of Immersion and Presence
Abstract
The research in this proposal focuses on developing and measuring objective and quantitativequalities of augmented reality. We will" establish reliable measures of how people perceive and behavein augmented reality. In virtual reality, there is a large body ofwor"k on the concepts of presence~ the illusion that the user of a virtual reality system is located within the virtual environment ~a"nd immersion, a related concept that refers to how well real-world stimuli are reproduced by thevirtual reality hardware. Extending" these definitions to augmented reality is difficult for reasonsinvolving the grounding provided by the real world in augmented reality and involving the typicaluse of subjective measures that attempt to capture presence.This proposal focuses on understanding and measuring objective and quantifiable qualities ofaugmented reality in the context of navigating through an environment. We propose to developmethods to establish and assess how augmented reality technologies impact the navigation task.We will extend methods we have pioneered in virtual reality that define fidelity as a match betweenaction in a mediated or augmented environment and in an unmediated environment. We will establishreliable measures of how people perceive and behave in augmented reality. Our goal isto" understand which AR technologies are most beneficial to navigation, and in what context theybenefit the navigation act. We will al"so develop quantitative measures of how users perceive andbehave in the presence of augmented reality technologies as compared to t"he real world, giving usthe ability to analyze and design augmented reality environments with high fidelity.Our approach is ground""ed in the idea that augmented and immersive virtual environments aremediated. Regardless of this mediation, possibilities for actio"n within these environments arisethrough users~ direct perception of action and interaction possibilities. We approach these possib"ilitiesfor action in mediated environments through an affordance lens, using the term inventedby the psychologist J. J. Gibson [Gi"bson 1979]. Affordance refers to the concept that the encapsulatingenvironment of an animal encodes meanings that are perceived dir"ectly (rather than solely generated via mental processing of raw sensory data). Thus, Gibson articulated a theory of how thestructu"re and features of the environment matter substantively in a subject~s basic disposition andorientation in the world. The fidelity of augmented environments can then be measured by how wellthe possibilities for action in these environment match the possibilitie"s for action in the unmediatedreal world. Factors such as rendering quality, that may affect the fidelity of the augmented environm""ent,can then be quantitatively assessed using this affordance lens. Moreover, augmentedtechnologies create new possibilities for a""ction within the context of navigation, and both assessingand evaluating them quantifiably can be carried out using the same proced"ures.The specific goals of this proposal are that: (1) We will develop an experimental platform andtestbed for affordances and augmented reality systems; (2) we will develop and evaluate humannavigation performance and fidelity in augmented reality using affordances; (3) we will evaluatethe contribution of augmented reality affordances to learning and memory through navigation bycomparing augmented reality affordances to other augmented reality cues for navigation. The endresult of this research will be a more compre"hensive understanding of how augmented reality technologiescan be deployed to support navigation, and what the guidelines and limit"ations of theirperformances can be expected to be for locomotion-based affordances.
Document Details
- Document Type
- DoD Grant Award
- Publication Date
- Dec 20, 2017
- Source ID
- N000141812964
Entities
People
- Robert Bodenheimer
Organizations
- Office of Naval Research
- United States Navy
- Vanderbilt University