Multi-user virtual reality (VR) systems support multiple locomotion methods, but coordination may be challenging when partners use different methods. We studied dyads navigating a shared virtual maze using symmetric (same) or asymmetric (different) locomotion methods-specifically, steering (continuous movement with physical turning) and teleportation (point-and-teleport within 30 meters with physical turning)-and assessed survey knowledge using direction and straightline distance estimates between objects. We found that (1) dyads acquired better survey knowledge than individuals across locomotion conditions; (2) teleportation showed no significant difference from steering in distance error and yielded significantly lower angular error; (3) asymmetric locomotion methods did not significantly increase cybersickness compared to symmetric locomotion methods; and (4) symmetric and asymmetric dyads showed no significant differences in distance or angular errors. Overall, these results suggest that collaborative navigation improves spatial learning and that asymmetric locomotion can improve accessibility without significantly increasing cybersickness in multi-user VR applications.

Maintaining physical distance is a crucial aspect of social interactions in the real world. This paper investigates how people embodied in self-avatars, manage such spacing in immersive virtual environments. Specifically, we measured how interpersonal distance (IPD) and peripersonal space (PPS) were affected by a surrounding virtual crowd. We designed three crowd density conditions - no crowd, a medium crowd, and a dense crowd - where participants interacted with a virtual human. Additionally, based on the results of a questionnaire, participants were grouped into one of three groups depending on their self-reported comfort level with crowds: some found crowds relaxing, some were indifferent, and some found crowds stressful. Our findings revealed that IPD decreased as crowd density increased, regardless of the participants' groupings. However, PPS exhibited a more nuanced response, with those stressed by a crowd showing heightened sensitivity to crowd density, reflected by larger PPS boundaries, faster reaction times, and less confidence when estimating their PPS boundary. The study also identified significant interactions between crowd density and participants' comfort levels, particularly among the group stressed by a crowd, where heightened stress led to expanded personal space. These results show the critical role of social and environmental factors in shaping spatial perception and behavior in virtual environments.

How children perceive and interact in immersive virtual environments (IVEs) is an important and emerging topic as virtual reality devices proliferate among this age group. How children understand their opportunities for action in an IVE — the perceived affordances of the space — in comparison to adults has, in particular, been rarely studied. This paper addresses this gap by examining children and adults’ reaching affordances in IVEs. We compared how children and adults judge their ability to reach up and out to targets at different distances in an IVE and how feedback from their actions may influence their accuracy. We found that both children and adults tend to overestimate their reaching capabilities, particularly when reaching out. However, by allowing them to actually reach up or out to the targets (action-outcome feedback), both groups significantly re-calibrated their judgments to align their estimates more closely with their actual capabilities. Notably, children exhibited greater initial overestimation than adults but recalibrated at a similar rate. These findings provide novel insights into how children interact with IVEs and suggest that well-designed feedback mechanisms can enhance their accuracy in action-based tasks. This work has implications for the design of IVEs for children, particularly in educational and training contexts, where ensuring accurate perception of capabilities is critical for learning and safety. By investigating both horizontal and vertical reach, this paper contributes to the understanding of affordance perception across age groups in IVEs, marking an essential step in adapting virtual reality technology to younger users.

Most modern head-mounted displays (HMDs) do not support the full range of adult inter-pupillary distances (IPDs) (i.e., 45 – 80 mm) due to technological limitations. Prior work indicates that the mismatch between a user’s actual IPD and the IPD set in the HMD (“IPD mismatch”) can affect distance and size judgments in near space (0 – 2 m). Therefore, users with IPDs outside of the supported HMD IPD range may not perceive virtual environments (VEs) accurately. Across three experiments, we investigated whether IPD mismatch significantly affects peoples’ distance judgments at longer distances (4 – 7 m). In two of the experiments, we recruited participants with IPDs smaller than the minimum supported IPD of the HTC Vive Pro HMD. They estimated distances in action space using verbal estimation (Experiment 1) and blind walking (Experiment 2) measures in indoor VEs. We found that: (i) distances were underestimated in action space, and (ii) IPD mismatch had minimal to no effect on their distance judgments. In a third experiment, we investigated whether we could generalize our findings to participants with an IPD within the supported HMD IPD range. We were able to replicate our previous findings. Overall, our findings suggest that IPD mismatch in an HMD may not be a major factor in distance underestimation in action space in VEs.

Omnidirectional treadmills provide one solution for locomoting through large virtual environments in confined physical spaces. Through two experiments, this paper evaluated locomotion on an omnidirectional treadmill (Cyberith Virtualizer Elite 2) by comparing it to natural walking in an open physical space. In Experiment 1, participants judged distances and completed a path integration task using the treadmill and natural walking. Participants walked further on the treadmill but had larger angular errors during path integration, potentially due to increased cybersickness. Experiment 2 varied path lengths during path integration and found that longer paths led to higher cybersickness scores but did not affect performance. The paper offers interpretations and suggestions for using omnidirectional treadmills in virtual reality.

Accurate perception of one’s action capabilities, or affordance perception, is essential for successful interaction with both real and virtual environments. Affordance perception can potentially be improved by receiving feedback. It is unknown what specific types of feedback are needed for improvements in affordance perception to occur, particularly in virtual environments where cues may be impoverished. The current work studied perception of horizontal reachability in virtual and augmented reality (VR and AR), specifically whether it would improve with feedback, and if any improvement transferred to the real world. Multiple types of feedback were studied in VR or AR: exploratory behavior, static outcome, and action outcome feedback. Our results indicate that exploratory behavior is sufficient for improvement in perceived reachability in VR, but in AR, outcome feedback is necessary. In both VR and AR, outcome feedback was required for improvement in perceived reachability to transfer to the real world. These findings have practical implications for training in virtual environments. If virtual environments are used for training actions that ultimately need to be performed in the real world, outcome feedback should be provided.

As applications for virtual reality (VR) and augmented reality (AR) technology increase, it will be important to understand how users perceive their action capabilities in virtual environments. Feedback about actions may help to calibrate perception for action opportunities (affordances) so that action judgments in VR and AR mirror actors’ real abilities. Previous work indicates that walking through a virtual doorway while wielding an object can calibrate the perception of one’s passability through feedback from collisions. In the current study, we aimed to replicate this calibration through feedback using a different paradigm in VR while also testing whether this calibration transfers to AR. Participants held a pole at 45°and made passability judgments in AR (pretest phase). Then, they made passability judgments in VR and received feedback on those judgments by walking through a virtual doorway while holding the pole (calibration phase). Participants then returned to AR to make posttest passability judgments. Results indicate that feedback calibrated participants’ judgments in VR. Moreover, this calibration transferred to the AR environment. In other words, after experiencing feedback in VR, passability judgments in VR and in AR became closer to an actor’s actual ability, which could make training applications in these technologies more effective.

The perception of the size of indoor rooms is traditionally measured with spaciousness ratings or verbal estimations of width and length, but these measures inherently focus on specific aspects of rooms that may not accurately capture a holistic perception of room size. The current study asked users to re-create the size of virtual rooms with a visual matching task by adjusting the dimensions of comparison virtual rooms to match those of a previously viewed virtual room. In addition to estimating room size with this novel room re-creation measure, participants also provided spaciousness ratings and verbal reports of length and width for each room. The results indicate that users accurately estimate relative room size using room re-creation. Room dimensions set in the room re-creation task were more accurate to the programmed dimensions and less variable than verbal reports. The room re-creation measure was positively correlated with spaciousness ratings, indicating that it also captures holistic perception of room size. Thus, the virtual room re-creation task accurately assesses both holistic and dimensional perception of the size of virtual rooms in an informative, quantitative manner. The room re-creation measure exemplifies the ability to use virtual reality as a unique tool for measuring space perception. The current study demonstrates the implementation of the novel room re-creation task and its ability to accurately capture the perception of virtual rooms, which can serve as a foundation for future studies to assess the ability of virtual room re-creation to capture the perception of real-world rooms. This new measure of room size perception is relevant to theoretical space perception research as well as applied research in architecture and interior design.

Immersive virtual environments (VEs) are most useful for training and education when viewers perceive and act accurately within them. Judgments of action capabilities within a VE provide a good measure of perceptual fidelity - the notion of how closely perception and action in the VE match that in the real world - and can also assess how perception for action may be calibrated with visual feedback based on one's own actions. In the current study we tested judgments of action capabilities within a VE for two different reaching behaviors: reaching out and reaching up. Our goal was to assess whether feedback from actual reaching improves judgments and if any recalibration due to feedback differed across reaching behaviors. We first measured participants' actual reaching out and reaching up capabilities so that feedback trials could be scaled to their actual abilities. Participants then completed blocks of alternating perceptual adjustment and feedback trials. In adjustment trials, they adjusted a virtual target to a distance perceived to be just reachable. In feedback trials, they viewed targets that were farther or closer than their actual reach, decided whether the target was reachable, and then reached out to the target to receive visual feedback from a hand-held controller. The first feedback block manipulated the target distance to be 30% over or under actual reach and subsequent blocks decreased the deviation to 20%,10% and 5% of actual reach. We found that for both reaching behaviors, reach was initially overestimated, and then perceptual estimations decreased to become more accurate over feedback blocks. Accuracy in the feedback trials themselves showed that targets just beyond reach were more difficult to judge correctly. This study establishes a straightforward methodology that can be used for calibration of actions in VEs and has implications for applications that depend on accurate reaching within VEs.

Augmented reality ( AR ) is important for training complex tasks, such as navigation, assembly, and medical procedures. The effectiveness of such training may depend on accurate spatial localization of AR objects in the environment. This article presents two experiments that test egocentric distance perception in augmented reality within and at the boundaries of action space (up to 35 m) in comparison with distance perception in a matched real-world ( RW ) environment. Using the Microsoft HoloLens, in Experiment 1, participants in two different RW settings judged egocentric distances (ranging from 10 to 35 m) to an AR avatar or a real person using a visual matching measure. Distances to augmented targets were underestimated compared to real targets in the two indoor, RW contexts. Experiment 2 aimed to generalize the results to an absolute distance measure using verbal reports in one of the indoor environments. Similar to Experiment 1, distances to augmented targets were underestimated compared to real targets. We discuss these findings with respect to the importance of methodologies that directly compare performance in real and mediated environments, as well as the inherent differences present in mediated environments that are “matched” to the real world.

Mixed reality is increasingly being used for training, especially for tasks that are difficult for humans to perform such as far distance perception. Although there has been much prior work on the perception of distance in mixed reality, the majority of the work has focused on distances ranging up to about 30 meters. The little work that has investigated distance perception beyond 30 meters has been mixed in terms of whether people tend to over- or underestimate distances in this range. In the current study, we investigated the perception of distances ranging from 25-500 meters in a fully mediated outdoor environment using the ZED Mini and HTC Vive Pro. To our knowledge, no work has examined distance perception to this range in mixed reality. Participants in the study verbally estimated the distances to a variety of objects. Distances were overestimated from 25-200 meters but underestimated from 300-500 meters. Overall, far distance perception in mixed reality may be biased in different directions depending on the range of distances, suggesting a need for future research in this area to support training of far distance perception.

The effectiveness of Augmented Reality (AR) for spatial applications is likely influenced by the extent to which users perceive that they can act on virtual objects as if they are real. While there are some promising initial results that action capabilities in AR are perceived similarly to the real world, AR differs from completely real-world viewing both in the visual information available within a restricted field of view (FOV) and in the ways that perceptual-motor feedback can be provided for the outcome of actions. We addressed both of these differences in a study of judgments of passing through an AR aperture defined by two moveable virtual walls presented via the Microsoft HoloLens. First, we investigated the possible effects of viewing distance on affordance judgments, predicting greater error in judgments at a close distance because of the inability to see the entirety of the aperture within the FOV. Second, we explored the effect of feedback on affordance judgments, predicting that verbal feedback about whether a judgment was correct would be sufficient to see improvements in judgments over time. In contrast to our predictions for distance, we found that judgments for passing through were closer to actual shoulder width when viewed at a distance near the aperture (0.85 m) compared to a farther viewing point (3.20 m). Verbal feedback reduced error over trials, but only at the farther distance, possibly because the judgments at the near distance were close to the ceiling of performance. These findings have implications for tasks that require accurate perception of action capabilities in AR, such as training procedures.