Immersive Virtual Environments (IVEs) incorporating tangible graspable objects are becoming more accessible for training and other applications. Visual and proprioceptive information has been shown to be important for accurate distance and size perception. However, previous research has shown that users overestimate the size of tangible objects in IVEs. To address this issue, researchers have demonstrated the use of calibration to alter users' perceptions. In this study, we examined the carryover effects of calibration on the perceived size of graspable dials in IVEs. Participants wore head-mounted displays and experienced two calibration perturbations: Divergent Plus (physical dials 10% larger than virtual) and Divergent Minus (physical dials smaller than virtual). These were compared to the baseline Convergent condition (equal diameters). The results showed significant effects of the calibration on the accuracy of diameter estimates. Overall, a higher overestimation of dial sizes for the haptics-only condition was observed as compared to the vision-only condition. Additionally, participants' estimations worsened when haptic information was added to the vision during calibration but improved when vision information was added to the haptics-only condition during calibration. These findings highlight the importance of calibration in improving the accuracy of size perception in IVEs and contribute to our understanding of how tangible graspable objects are perceived in immersive virtual environments.

How do user-defined gestures for mixed reality change when users’ hands are engaged in tasks? To address this question, we conducted a gesture elicitation study to understand user preferences and the characteristics of gestures conceptualized in three scenarios with varying levels of hand constraints, namely: "both hands free", "one hand fixed", and "both hands busy". We analyzed these gestures across multiple dimensions and compared our findings with those from prior research. Our results indicate that when both hands are occupied, users tend to favor head gestures over those involving other body parts, such as the eyes or legs. Additionally, we found that most of the proposed gestures were metaphorical, with many influenced by legacy bias. These insights enhance our understanding of how hand constraints influence gesture choices in mixed reality scenarios.

Although companion virtual agents (CVAs) are increasingly adopted to support well-being, interaction patterns between adults and CVAs remain underexplored. This study examines how users engage with CVAs over time, exploring conversation patterns, interaction frequency, attitudes, and emotional responses over a seven-day period. Twenty-four adults engaged with a GPT-4-powered embodied CVA daily, discussing topics from personal interests to emotional reflections. Quantitative measures, including loneliness and affect scales, revealed no significant reduction in loneliness but noted decreases in positive affect and nervousness. Qualitative analysis highlighted evolving conversational dynamics, with participants shifting from exploratory questions to more reflective and personal discussions. Participants appreciated the agent’s ability to engage in fluid and meaningful conversations. However, participants also noted shortcomings, including limited recall and occasional conversational unnaturalness. These findings inform the design of CVAs, emphasizing the need for adaptive conversational strategies, enhanced emotional responsiveness, and improved memory systems to foster meaningful connections.

Understanding visual attention in users during stressful situations with emotional crowds is crucial for the improvement of emergency response, safety, and efficiency. To explore this, we conducted a study examining how the organizational structure and reaction behavior of a virtual emotional crowd affected subjects' visual attention. Participants completed a task in a virtual reality simulation featuring a fire threat. The experiment employed two between-subjects factors (Crowd Type and Reaction Type) and one within-subjects factor (Simulation Phase). The simulation consisted of a normal phase, where participants interacted with virtual human (VHs) pedestrians and vendors in a virtual marketplace, followed by a stressful phase featuring a fire threat within the same setting. The Crowd Type varied between individuals walking alone (Individual Condition) and small groups of 3-4 members (Group Condition). The Reaction Type determined whether the virtual crowd ignored the threat or moved faster to escape. We analyzed subjects' fixation gaze across conditions, revealing that visual attention behavior was significantly influenced by Crowd Type, Reaction Type, and Simulation Phase.

Existing video analysis models often lack explainability, perform poorly on long videos, and frequently hallucinate. Commercial solutions are closed-source and costly. We introduce CReLeRI, an open-source system for action detection in untrimmed videos. CReLeRI segments videos using scene and action transitions, detects actions and their arguments and grounds them in 3D space to improve interpretability and reduce hallucinations. The system promotes transparency and trust in AI-driven analysis of complex, real-world videos. A demonstration video is also available.

Augmented Reality (AR) interactions feature users interacting with virtual objects registered in the physical world. With contemporary AR experiences increasingly featuring interactions at distances, we conceptualized The Force, a technique that allows users to clone distant objects and manipulate their replicas. An empirical evaluation was conducted, comparing it against two well-established techniques including controller-based ray-casting and a gaze-based pinching technique in a pick-and-place task. We employed a within-subjects design, collecting data on both objective performance and subjective user experience. Results suggest that The Force allows for higher levels of accuracy and efficiency in medium-field tasks that require precision and fine motor control. Furthermore, we discovered avenues towards iteratively refining this technique. We go on to discuss the implications of our findings in an effort to facilitate better interactions in augmented reality.

In immersive virtual environments (IVEs), accurate size perception is critical, especially in training simulations designed to mimic real-world tasks, such as, nuclear power plant control room or medical procedures. These simulations have dials or instruments of varying sizes. Visual information of the objects alone, often fails to capture subtle size differences in virtual reality (VR). However, integrating haptic and hand-avatars may potentially improve accuracy and performance. This improvement could be especially beneficial for real-world scenarios where hand(s) are intermittently visible or obscured. To investigate how this intermittent presence or absence of body-scaled hand-avatars affects size perception when integrated with haptic information, we conducted 2x2 mixed-factorial experiment design using a near-field, size-estimation task in VR. The experiment conditions compared size estimations with or without virtual hand visibility in the perception and reporting phases. The task involved 16 graspable objects of varying sizes and randomly repeated 3 times across 48 trials per participant (total 80 participants). We employed Linear Mixed Models (LMMs) analysis to objective measures: perceived size, residual error and proportional errors. Results revealed that as the tangible-graspable size increases, overestimation reduces if the hand-avatars are visible in the reporting phase. Also, overestimation reduces as the number of trials increases, if the hand-avatars are visible in the reporting phase. Thus, the presence of hand-avatars facilitated perceptual calibration. This novel study, with different combinations of hand-avatar visibility, taking perception and reporting of size as two separate phases, could open future research directions in more complex scenarios for refined integration of sensory modalities and consequently enhance real-world application performance.

Spatial perception in virtual reality (VR) has been a hot research topic for years. Most of the studies on this topic have focused on visual perception and distance perception. Fewer have examined auditory perception and room size perception, although these aspects are important for improving VR experiences. Recently, a number of studies have shown that perception can be calibrated to information that is relevant to the successful completion of everyday tasks in VR (such as distance estimation and spatial perception). Also, some recent studies have examined calibration of auditory perception as a way to compensate for the classic distance compression problem in VR. In this paper, we present a calibration method for both visual and auditory room size perception. We conducted experiments to investigate how people perceive the size of a virtual room and how the accuracy of their size perception can be calibrated by manipulating perceptible auditory and visual information in VR. The results show that people were more accurate in perceiving room size by means of vision than in audition, but that they could still use audition to perceive room size. The results also show that during calibration, auditory room size perception exhibits learning effects and its accuracy was greatly improved after calibration.

The perception of distance is a complex process that often involves sensory information beyond that of just vision. In this work, we investigated if depth perception based on auditory information can be calibrated, a process by which perceptual accuracy of depth judgments can be improved by providing feedback and then performing corrective actions. We further investigated if perceptual learning through carryover effects of calibration occurs in different levels of a virtual environment’s visibility based on different levels of virtual lighting. Users performed an auditory depth judgment task over several trials in which they walked where they perceived an aural sound to be, yielding absolute estimates of perceived distance. This task was performed in three sequential phases: pretest, calibration, posttest. Feedback on the perceptual accuracy of distance estimates was only provided in the calibration phase, allowing to study the calibration of auditory depth perception. We employed a 2 (Visibility of virtual environment) $\times 3$ (Phase) $\times 5$ (Target Distance) multi-factorial design, manipulating the phase and target distance as within-subjects factors, and the visibility of the virtual environment as a between-subjects factor. Our results revealed that users generally tend to underestimate aurally perceived distances in VR similar to the distance compression effects that commonly occur in visual distance perception in VR. We found that auditory depth estimates, obtained using an absolute measure, can be calibrated to become more accurate through feedback and corrective action. In terms of environment visibility, we find that environments visible enough to reveal their extent may contain visual information that users attune to in scaling aurally perceived depth.

Mixed reality (MR) interactions feature users interacting with a combination of virtual and physical components. Inspired by research investigating aspects associated with near-field interactions in augmented and virtual reality (AR & VR), we investigated how avatarization, the physicality of the interacting components, and the interaction technique used to manipulate a virtual object affected performance and perceptions of user experience in a mixed reality fundamentals of laparoscopic peg-transfer task wherein users had to transfer a virtual ring from one peg to another for a number of trials. We employed a 3 (Physicality of pegs) X 3 (Augmented Avatar Representation) X 2 (Interaction Technique) multi-factorial design, manipulating the physicality of the pegs as a between-subjects factor, the type of augmented self-avatar representation, and the type of interaction technique used for object-manipulation as within-subjects factors. Results indicated that users were significantly more accurate when the pegs were virtual rather than physical because of the increased salience of the task-relevant visual information. From an avatar perspective, providing users with a reach envelope-extending representation, though useful, was found to worsen performance, while co-located avatarization significantly improved performance. Choosing an interaction technique to manipulate objects depends on whether accuracy or efficiency is a priority. Finally, the relationship between the avatar representation and interaction technique dictates just how usable mixed reality interactions are deemed to be.

Active exploration in virtual reality (VR) involves users navigating immersive virtual environments, going from one place to another. While navigating, users often engage in secondary tasks that require attentional resources, as in the case of distracted driving. Inspired by research generally studying the effects of task demands on cybersickness (CS), we investigated how the attentional demands specifically associated with secondary tasks performed during exploration affect CS. Downstream of this, we studied how increased attentional demands from secondary tasks affect spatial memory and navigational performance. We discuss the results of a multi-factorial between-subjects study, manipulating a secondary task's demand across two levels and studying its effects on CS in two different sickness-inducing levels of an exploration experience. The secondary task's demand was manipulated by parametrically varying $n$ in an aural $n$-back working memory task and the provocativeness of the experience was manipulated by varying how frequently users experienced a yaw-rotational reorientation effect during the exploration. Results revealed that increases in the secondary task's demand increased sickness levels, also resulting in a higher temporal onset rate, especially when the experience was not already highly sickening. Increased attentional demand from the secondary task also vitiated navigational performance and spatial memory. Overall, increased demands from secondary tasks performed during navigation produce deleterious effects on the VR experience.

Cybersickness (CS) is one of the challenges that has hindered the widespread adoption of Virtual Reality (VR). Consequently, researchers continue to explore novel means to mitigate the undesirable effects associated with this affliction, one that may require a combination of remedies as opposed to a solitary stratagem. Inspired by research probing into the use of distractions as a means to control pain, we investigated the efficacy of this countermeasure against CS, studying how the introduction of temporally time-gated distractions affects this malady during a virtual experience featuring active exploration. Downstream of this, we studied how other aspects of the VR experience are affected by this intervention. We discuss the results of a between-subjects study manipulating the presence, sensory modality, and nature of periodic and short-lived (5-12 seconds) distractor stimuli across four experimental conditions: 1) no-distractors (ND); 2) auditory distractors (AD); 3) visual distractors (VD); 4) cognitive distractors (CD). Two of these conditions (VD and AD) formed a yoked control design wherein every matched pair of 'seers' and 'hearers' was periodically exposed to distractors that were identical in terms of content, temporality, duration, and sequence. In the CD condition, each participant had to periodically perform a 2-back working memory task, the duration and temporality of which was matched to distractors presented in each matched pair of the yoked conditions. These three conditions were compared to a baseline control group featuring no distractions. Results indicated that the reported sickness levels were lower in all three distraction groups in comparison to the control group. The intervention also increased the amount of time users were able to endure the VR simulation and avoided causing detriments to spatial memory and virtual travel efficiency. Overall, it appears that it may be possible to make users less consciously aware and bothered by the symptoms of CS, thereby reducing its perceived severity.

Control over an avatar in virtual reality can improve one's perceived sense of agency and embodiment towards their avatar. Yet, the relationship between control on agency and embodiment remains unclear. This work aims to investigate two main ideas: (1) the effectiveness of currently used metrics in measuring agency and embodiment and (2) the relationship between different levels of control on agency, embodiment, and cognitive performance. To do this, we conducted a between-participants user study with three conditions on agency ($\mathrm{n}=57$). Participants embodied an avatar with one of three types of control (i.e., Low - control over head only, Medium - control over head and torso, or High - control over head, torso, and arms) and completed a Stroop test. Our results indicate that the degree of control afforded to participants impacted their embodiment and cognitive performance but, as expected, could not be detected in the self-reported agency scores. Furthermore, our results elucidated further insights into the relationship between control and embodiment, suggesting potential uncanny valley-like effects. Future work should aim to refine agency measures to better capture the effect of differing levels of control and consider other methodologies to measure agency.

As virtual reality (VR) technology sees more use in various fields, there is a greater need to understand how to effectively design dynamic virtual environments. As of now, there is still uncertainty in how well users of a VR system are capable of tracking moving targets in a virtual space. In this work, we examined the influence of sensory modality and visual feedback on the accuracy of head-gaze moving target tracking. To this end, a between subjects study was conducted wherein participants would receive targets that were visual, auditory, or audiovisual. Each participant performed two blocks of experimental trials, with a calibration block in between. Results indicate that audiovisual targets promoted greater improvement in tracking performance over single-modality targets, and that audio-only targets are more difficult to track than those of other modalities.

Over the past two decades self-avatars have been shown to affect the perception of both oneself and of environmental properties including the sizes and distances of elements in immersive virtual environments. However, virtual avatars that accurately match the body proportions of their users remain inaccessible to the general public. As such, most virtual experiences that represent the user have a generic avatar that does not fit the proportions of the users' body. This can negatively affect judgments involving affordances, such as passability and maneuverability, which pertain to the relationship between the properties of environmental elements relative to the properties of the user providing information about actions that can be enacted. This is especially true when the task requires the user to maneuver around moving objects like in games. Therefore, it is necessary to understand how different sized self-avatars affect the perception of affordances in dynamic virtual environments. To better understand this, we conducted an experiment investigating how a self-avatar that is either the same size, 20% shorter, or 20% taller, than the user's own body affects passability judgments in a dynamic virtual environment. Our results suggest that the presence of self-avatars results in better regulatory and safer road crossing behavior, and helps participants synchronize self-motion to external stimuli quicker than in the absence of self-avatars.

With the popularity of Virtual Reality (VR) on the rise, creators from a variety of fields are building increasingly complex experiences that allow users to express themselves more naturally. Self-avatars and object interaction in virtual worlds are at the heart of these experiences. However, these give rise to several perception based challenges that have been the focus of research in recent years. One area that garners most interest is understanding the effects of self-avatars and object interaction on action capabilities or affordances in VR. Affordances have been shown to be influenced by the anthropometric and anthropomorphic properties of the self-avatar embodied. However, self-avatars cannot fully represent real world interaction and fail to provide information about the dynamic properties of surfaces in the environment. For example, pressing against a board to feel its rigidity. This lack of accurate dynamic information can be further amplified when interacting with virtual handheld objects as the weight and inertial feedback associated with them is often mismatched. To investigate this phenomenon, we looked at how the absence of dynamic surface properties affect lateral passability judgments when carrying virtual handheld objects in the presence or absence of gender matched body-scaled self-avatars. Results suggest that participants can calibrate to the missing dynamic information in the presence of self-avatars to make lateral passability judgments, but rely on their internal body schema of a compressed physical body depth in the absence of self-avatars.

User representations are critical to the virtual experience, and involve both the input device used to support interactions as well as how the user is virtually represented in the scene. Inspired by previous work that has shown effects of user representations on the perceptions of relatively static affordances, we attempt to investigate how end-effector representations affect the perceptions of affordances that dynamically change over time. Towards this end, we empirically evaluated how different virtual hand representations affect users' perceptions of dynamic affordances in an object retrieval task wherein users were tasked with retrieving a target from a box for a number of trials while avoiding collisions with its moving doors. We employed a 3 (virtual end-effector representation) X 13 (frequency of moving doors) X 2 (target object size) multi-factorial design, manipulating the input modality and its concomitant virtual end-effector representation as a between-subjects factor across three experimental conditions: (1) Controller (using a controller represented as a virtual controller); (2) Controller-hand (using a controller represented as a virtual hand); (3) Glove (using a hand tracked hi-fidelity glove represented as a virtual hand). Results indicated that the controller-hand condition produced lower levels of performance than both the other conditions. Furthermore, users in this condition exhibited a diminished ability to calibrate their performance over trials. Overall, we find that representing the end-effector as a hand tends to increase embodiment but can also come at the cost of performance, or an increased workload due to a discordant mapping between the virtual representation and the input modality used. It follows that VR system designers should carefully consider the priorities and target requirements of the application being developed when choosing the type of end-effector representation for users to embody in immersive virtual experiences.

Inspired by previous works showing promise for AR self-avatarization - providing users with an augmented self avatar, we investigated whether avatarizing users' end-effectors (hands) improved their interaction performance on a near-field, obstacle avoidance, object retrieval task wherein users were tasked with retrieving a target object from a field of non-target obstacles for a number of trials. We employed a 3 (Augmented hand representation) X 2 (density of obstacles) X 2 (size of obstacles) X 2 (virtual light intensity) multi-factorial design, manipulating the presence/absence and anthropomorphic fidelity of augmented self-avatars overlaid on the user's real hands, as a between subjects factor across three experimental conditions: (1) No-Augmented Avatar (using only real hands); (2) Iconic-Augmented Avatar; (3) Realistic Augmented Avatar. Results indicated that self-avatarization improved interaction performance and was perceived as more usable regardless of the anthropomorphic fidelity of avatar. We also found that the virtual light intensity used in illuminating holograms affects how visible one's real hands are. Overall, our findings seem to indicate that interaction performance may improve when users are provided with a visual representation of the AR system's interacting layer in the form of an augmented self-avatar.

Distance compression, which refers to the underestimation of ego-centric distance to objects, is a common problem in immersive virtual environments. Besides visually compensating the compressed distance, several studies have shown that auditory information can be an alternative solution for this problem. In particular, reverberation time (RT) has been proven to be an effective method to compensate distance compression. To further explore the feasibility of applying audio information to improve distance perception, we investigate whether users’ egocentric distance perception can be calibrated, and whether the calibrated effect can be carried over and even sustain for a longer duration. We conducted a study to understand the perceptual learning and carryover effects by using RT as stimuli for users to perceive distance in IVEs. The results show that the carryover effect exists after calibration, which indicates people can learn to perceive distances by attuning reverberation time, and the accuracy even remains a constant level after 6 months. Our findings could potentially be utilized to improve the distance perception in VR systems as the calibration of auditory distance perception in VR could sustain for several months. This could eventually avoid the burden of frequent training regimens.

Humans communicate by writing, often taking notes that assist thinking. With the growing popularity of collaborative Virtual Reality (VR) applications, it is imperative that we better understand aspects that affect writing in these virtual experiences. On-air writing in VR is a popular writing paradigm due to its simplicity in implementation without any explicit needs for specialized hardware. A host of factors can affect the efficacy of this writing paradigm and in this work, we delved into investigating the same. Along these lines, we investigated the effects of a combination of factors on users’ on-air writing performance, aiming to understand the circumstances under which users can both effectively and efficiently write in VR. We were interested in studying the effects of the following factors: (1) input modality: brush vs. near-field raycast vs. pointing gesture, (2) inking trigger method: haptic feedback vs. button based trigger, and (3) canvas geometry: plane vs. hemisphere. To evaluate the writing performance, we conducted an empirical evaluation with thirty participants, requiring them to write the words we indicated under different combinations of these factors. Dependent measures including the writing speed, accuracy rates, perceived workloads, and so on, were analyzed. Results revealed that the brush based input modality produced the best results in writing performance, that haptic feedback was not always effective over button based triggering, and that there are trade-offs associated with the different types of canvas geometries used. This work attempts at laying a foundation for future investigations that seek to understand and further improve the on-air writing experience in immersive virtual environments.

The availability of new and improved display, tracking and input devices for Virtual Reality experiences has facilitated the use of partial and full body self-avatars in interaction with virtual objects in the environment. However, scaling the avatar to match the user's body dimensions remains to be a cumbersome process. Moreover, the effect of body-scaled self-avatars on size perception of virtual handheld objects and related action capabilities has been relatively unexplored. To this end, we present an empirical evaluation investigating the effect of the presence or absence of body-scaled self-avatars and visuo-motor calibration on frontal passability affordance judgments when interacting with virtual handheld objects. The self-avatar's dimensions were scaled to match the participant's eyeheight, arms length, shoulder width and body depth along the mid section. The results indicate that the presence of body-scaled self-avatars produce more realistic judgments of passability and aid the calibration process when interacting with virtual objects. Also, participants rely on the visual size of virtual objects to make judgments even though the kinesthetic and proprioceptive feedback of the object is missing or mismatched.

Virtual Reality (VR) technologies are increasingly being applied to various contexts like those gaming, therapy, training, and education. Several of these applications require high degrees of accuracy in spatial and depth perception. Contemporary VR experiences continue to be confronted by the issue of distance compression wherein people systematically underestimate distances in the virtual world, leading to impoverished experiences. Consequently, a number of studies have focused on extensively understanding and exploring factors that influence this phenomenon to address the challenges it poses. Inspired by previous work that has sought to compensate distance compression effects in VR, we examined the potential of manipulating an auditory stimulus’ reverberation time (RT) to alter how users perceive depth. To this end, we conducted a two action forced choice study in which participants repeatedly made relative depth judgements between a pair of scenes featuring a virtual character placed at different distances with varying RTs. Results revealed that RT influences how users perceive depth with this influence being more pronounced in the near field. We found that users tend to associate longer RTs with farther distances and vice versa, indicating the potential to alter RT towards compensating distance underestimation in VR. However, it must be noted that excessively increasing RT (especially in the near field) could come at the cost of sensory segregation, wherein users are unable to unify visual and auditory sensory stimuli in their perceptions of depth. Researchers must hence strive to find the optimal amount of RT to add to a stimulus to ensure seamless virtual experiences.

Prototyping electronic circuits is often facilitated by web-based tutorials and breadboards. Several virtual and hybrid platforms do exist, each carrying their own limitations. Some of these platforms fall prey to split-attention effects, wherein users are required to split their attention to integrate multiple sources of spatially separated information. This hinders the learning and prototyping processes. Other platforms provide a single source of information, but lack tangible interaction with electronic components or suffer from the absence of active feedback which can also hinder these processes. There is hence a need for prototyping platforms that mitigate split attention effects, while continuing to provide other desirable aspects such as tangible interaction. To address this, we present three editions of PPCards, a card-based platform for prototyping electronic circuits, towards overcoming limitations of existing paradigms. Through a comparative study, it was determined that the first edition of PPCards outdid the conventional breadboard web-based tutorial paradigm in aspects of split attention, usability, and user experience. The second and third editions build upon successful characteristics of the first, additionally provisioning support for multimedia content and real-time feedback during the prototyping process. Based on quantitative data and qualitative feedback, we go on to discuss design considerations for future tangible card-based tools.

Virtual reality (VR) experiences currently tend to focus on full body interactions. However, fine motor control in actions such as writing and drawing are seldom studied. Challenges include the inability to perceive fine details due to the low resolution of head mounted displays, the difficulty in simulating fine motor actions in virtual environments, tracking instabilities, latency issues, etc. State of the art VR has managed to address a host of such concerns, supporting a variety of input mechanisms for activities such as writing, sketching, immersive modeling, etc. With VR increasingly being applied in education and medical contexts where writing and note taking is a crucial, it is important to study how well humans can perform these tasks in VR. In a between-subjects empirical evaluation, we studied participants' fine motor coordination with several digital input based writing and artistic tasks performed both in virtual and real world settings, further examining the effects of providing a virtual self avatar on task performance. We integrated multiple tracking systems and applied inverse kinematics to animate the virtual body and simulate hand motions. We went on to compare how different the outputs of these digital input metaphors are to a real world pen and paper approach in an effort to ascertain where we currently stand in being able to support writing and note taking in virtual world contexts. Overall, it seems to be the case that while writing and artistic activities can be successfully supported in VR applications using specialized input devices, the accuracy with which users perform such tasks is significantly higher in the real world, highlighting the need for developments that support such fine motor tasks in VR.

Immersive Virtual Environments (IVEs) incorporating tangibles are becoming more accessible. The success of applications combining 3D printed tangibles and VR often depends on how accurately size is perceived. Research has shown that visuo-haptic perceptual information is important in the perception of size. However, it is unclear how these sensory-perceptual channels are affected by immersive virtual environments that incorporate tangible objects. Towards understanding the effects of different sensory information channels in the near field size perception of tangibles of graspable sizes in IVEs, we conducted a between-subjects study evaluating the accuracy of size perception across three experimental conditions (Vision-only, Haptics-only, Vision and Haptics). We found that overall, participants consistently over-estimated the size of the dials regardless of the type of perceptual information that was presented. Participants in the haptics only condition overestimated diameters to a larger degree as compared to other conditions. Participants were most accurate in the vision only condition and least accurate in the haptics only condition. Our results also revealed that increased efficiency in reporting size over time was most pronounced in the visuo- haptic condition.

The commercialization and lowering costs of consumer grade Virtual Reality (VR) devices has made the technology increasingly accessible to users around the world. The usage of VR technology is often accompanied by an undesirable side effect called cybersickness. Cyber-sickness is the feeling of discomfort that occurs during VR experiences, producing symptoms similar to those of motion sickness. It continues to remain one of the biggest hurdles to the widespread adoption of VR, making it increasingly important to explore and understand the factors that influence its onset. In this work, we investigated the influence of the presence/absence of motion control on the onset and severity of cybersickness in an HMD based VR driving simulation employing steering as a travel metaphor. Towards this end, we conducted a between subjects study manipulating the presence of control between three experimental conditions, two of which (Driving condition and Yoked Pair condition) formed a yoked control design where every pair of drivers and their yoked pairs were exposed to identical vehicular motion stimuli created by participants in the driving condition. In the other condition (Autonomous Car condition), participants experienced a program driven autonomous vehicle simulation. Results indicated that participants in the Driving condition experienced higher levels of cybersickness than participants in the Yoked Pair condition. While these results don’t conform to findings from previous research which suggests that having control over motion reduces cybersickness, it seems to point towards the importance of the fidelity of the control metaphor’s feedback response in alleviating cybersickness. Simply allowing one control their motion may not readily alleviate cybersickness but could instead increase it in such HMD based VR driving simulations. It may hence be important to consider how well the control metaphor and its feedback matches users’ expectations if we want to successfully mitigate cybersickness.

The commercialization of Virtual Reality (VR) devices is making the technology increasingly accessible to users around the world. Despite the success that VR is starting to see with its growing popularity, it has yet to become widely adopted and achieve its ultimate goal- convincingly simulate real life like experiences. The inability to generate adequate levels of presence and to prevent the manifestation of cybersickness are the two prominent barriers that have hindered VR from achieving its ultimate goal. While traditional research has examined factors that influence (correlate with) the onset and severity cybersickness, there is still a gap in our knowledge about the consequences of having motion control on cybersickness in immersive virtual environments (IVE’s) achieved using tracked Head Mounted Displays (HMD’s). Furthermore, outside of a correlational capacity, it is still unclear as to what causes cybersickness to affect presence in immersive virtual environments. The success of immersive virtual reality as a technology will hence largely come down to our ability to understand the interrelationship between these variables and then address the challenges they pose. Towards this end, we investigated how the affordance of motion control affects cybersickness and presence in an HMD based VR driving simulation by conducting a between subjects study where we manipulated the affordance of control between three experimental conditions. We leverage structural equation modeling in an attempt to build a framework that explains the relationship between virtual motion control, workload, cybersickness, time spent in the simulation, perceived time and presence. Our structural model helps explain why motion control could be an important factor to consider in addressing VR’s challenges and realizing its ultimate aim to simulate reality.

Cybersickness (CS) is one of the challenges that has hindered the widespread adoption of Virtual Reality and its applications. Consequently, a number of studies have focused on extensively understanding and reducing CS. Inspired by previous work that has sought to reduce CS using foveated rendering and Field of View (FOV) restrictions, we investigated how the presence and size of a static central window in peripheral FOV blurring affects CS. To facilitate this peripheral FOV blur, we applied a Gaussian blur effect in the display peripheral region, provisioning a full-resolution central window. Thirty participants took part in a three-session, within-subjects experiment, performing search and spatial updating tasks in a first-person, slow-walking, maze-traveling scenario. Two different central window sizes (small and large) were tested against a baseline condition that didn’t feature display peripheral blurring. Results revealed that the baseline condition produced higher levels of CS than both conditions with a central window. While there were no significant differences between the small and large windows, we observed interaction effects suggesting an influence of window size on “adaptation to CS.” When the central window is small, adaptation to CS seems to take more time but is more pronounced. The interventions had no effect on spatial updating and presence, but were detectable when the blurred area was larger (small central window). Lower sickness levels observed in both window conditions supports the use of peripheral FOV blurring to reduce CS, reducing our dependence on eye tracking. This being said, researchers must strive to find the right balance between window size and detectability to ensure seamless virtual experiences.

The commercialization of Virtual Reality (VR) devices has made it easier for everyday users to experience VR from the comfort of their living rooms. This recent uptake in VR has also increased reported incidents of cybersickness. Cybersickness refers to the discomfort experienced by an individual while experiencing virtual environments. The symptoms are similar to those of motion sickness but are more disorienting in nature resulting in dizziness, blurred vision, etc. Cybersickness is currently one of the biggest hurdles to the widespread adoption of VR, and it is therefore critical to explore the factors that influence its onset. Towards this end, we present a proof of concept simulation to study cybersickness in highly realistic immersive virtual environments.