Virtual reality (VR) technology offers highly controlled immersive experiences that can be used to conduct spatial cognition research. However, there are VR-specific perceptual biases that reduce its ability to generalize all findings to real-world scenarios. One specific bias causes observers to perceive objects as closer than intended, a phenomenon called distance compression. Although prior research has focused primarily on visual and technological solutions to distance compression, using other senses as a potential remedy (e.g., hearing) for the bias has not been explored. Here, participants completed both a blind-walking task for distance estimation and a cross-modal perceptual-matching task to evaluate audiovisual spatial displacement. The results showed that real-world sounds spatially displaced both in front of and behind a corresponding visual target increased the accuracy of blind walking relative to vision-only cues, albeit with a small effect. Individual differences measures, including performance on the perceptual-matching task and the relative variability of auditory and visual stimuli, did not account for the individual differences in the effectiveness of spatially displaced sounds. Overall, this study demonstrates the potential for adding multisensory information (specifically the addition of non-virtual sounds) to improve the accuracy of distance perception in VR.

Historically, distances are underestimated in virtual environments, and a mismatch between a participant's inter-pupillary distance (IPD) and the inter-axial distance (IAD) of the head-mounted display (HMD) could contribute to underestimation, but prior work has not examined how this interacts with lens type or target location in the visual field. Prior work testing the effects of IPD mismatch on distance perception in immersive virtual environments (IVEs) shows mixed results for distances within 2-10 meters. One limitation is that this work did not consider the variety of optical lenses employed in different HMDs. The lens type could affect distance perception differently depending on IPD and could affect it even more for targets appearing on the sides of the display rather than in front of the user. We examined whether the HMD type and location of targets in the virtual visual field affect perception when IPD is mismatched and matched. Using a blind walking task, participants judged the distance to targets that were either in front or to the side of the participant. One group viewed targets in the Varjo XR-3 and the other viewed them in the HTC Vive Pro. We found that distances were judged to be farther in the periphery than in front of users for both devices. Only in the HTC Vive Pro did an increase in IPD mismatch result in increased distance estimates for targets presented directly in front of the participant. Directional angular error (error observed in orienting to the target) increased as the target angle increased for both devices. However, in the Varjo XR-3, a higher IPD mismatch resulted in greater angular error when viewing targets to the side. Overall, the findings show that a mismatched IPD can affect depth and orientation judgments depending on target position in the display. However, there are differences in both FOV and resolution that could influence distance and orientation perception. A second experiment was conducted to examine whether these factors contributed to perception. To test for this, we down-sampled the Varjo XR-3 to match the horizontal field of view and resolution of the HTC Vive Pro. We found that orientation error was mostly affected by resolution and FOV as the adjusted Varjo XR-3 yielded similar orientation perception as the HTC Vive Pro. With this knowledge, researchers should consider HMDs, IPD, and viewing area in the display as possible influences on distance and orientation perception in order to make VR accessible and accurate to all users.

We investigate whether tactile charts support comprehension and learning of complex visualizations for blind and low-vision (BLV) individuals and contribute four tactile chart designs and an interview study. Visualizations are powerful tools for conveying data, yet BLV individuals typically can rely only on assistive technologies-primarily alternative texts-to access this information. Prior research shows the importance of mental models of chart types for interpreting these descriptions, yet BLV individuals have no means to build such a mental model based on images of visualizations. Tactile charts show promise to fill this gap in supporting the process of building mental models. Yet studies on tactile data representations mostly focus on simple chart types, and it is unclear whether they are also appropriate for more complex charts as would be found in scientific publications. Working with two BLV researchers, we designed 3D-printed tactile template charts with exploration instructions for four advanced chart types: UpSet plots, violin plots, clustered heatmaps, and faceted line charts. We then conducted an interview study with 12 BLV participants comparing whether using our tactile templates improves mental models and understanding of charts and whether this understanding translates to novel datasets experienced through alt texts. Thematic analysis shows that tactile models support chart type understanding and are the preferred learning method by BLV individuals. We also report participants' opinions on tactile chart design and their role in BLV education.

Abstract Data visualizations are typically not accessible to blind and low‐vision (BLV) users. Automatically generating text descriptions offers an enticing mechanism for democratizing access to the information held in complex scientific charts, yet appropriate procedures for generating those texts remain elusive. Pursuing this issue, we study a single complex chart form: UpSet plots. UpSet Plots are a common way to analyze set data, an area largely unexplored by prior accessibility literature. By analyzing the patterns present in real‐world examples, we develop a system for automatically captioning any UpSet plot. We evaluated the utility of our captions via semi‐structured interviews with (N=11) BLV users and found that BLV users find them informative. In extensions, we find that sighted users can use our texts similarly to UpSet plots and that they are better than naive LLM usage.

Virtual reality (VR) has become a popular tool for studying navigation, providing the experimental control of a laboratory setting but also the potential for immersive and natural experiences that resemble the real world. For VR to be an effective tool to study navigation and be used for training or rehabilitation, it is important to establish whether performance is similar across virtual and real environments. Much of the existing navigation research has focused on young adult performance either in a virtual or a real environment, resulting in an open question regarding the validity of VR for studying age-related effects on spatial navigation. In this paper, young (18-30 years old) and older adults (60 years and older) performed the same navigation task in similar real and virtual environments. They completed a homing task, requiring walking along two legs of a triangle and returning to a home location, under three sensory conditions: visual cues (environmental landmarks present), body-based self-motion cues, and the combination of both cues. Our findings reveal that homing performance in VR demonstrates the same age-related differences as those observed in the real-world task. That said, within-age group differences arise when comparing cue use across environment types. In particular, young adults are less accurate and more variable with self-motion cues than visual cues in VR, while older adults show similar deficits with both cues. However, when both age groups can access multiple sensory cues, navigation performance does not differ between environment types. These results demonstrate that VR effectively captures age-related differences, with navigation performance most closely resembling performance in the real world when navigators can rely on an array of sensory information. Such findings have implications for future research on the aging population, highlighting that VR can be a valuable tool, particularly when multisensory cues are available.

Virtual reality (VR) has become widely accessible through the development of more commercially available head-mounted displays (HMDs). This accessibility has particularly increased the use of VR in children. However, much of the previous research on understanding perception and action in virtual reality has only been conducted on adults, leaving many open questions about how children perceive and interact with virtual environments. In this paper, we examine whether there are age-related differences in judging the ability to step over a gap using immersive VR. Affordances are a useful measure for understanding objective perceptions of the actions that can be performed in an immersive virtual environment. Such measures are particularly well suited for children given they can easily respond yes or no as to whether they perceive that they can step over a gap. Further, manipulations of the size of virtual body parts could allow us to ascertain how much children rely on the perceived size of their bodies to make decisions about actions. In Experiment 1, adults and children saw motion-tracked virtual feet that were either larger or smaller than their actual foot size. They had to respond as to whether they could step over gaps that varied in width. They also gave perceptual estimates of the width of the gap in feet or meters. The results showed that adults who experience the smaller virtual feet underestimated their stepping ability more than adults with the larger feet. However, children had the opposite effect, such that seeing smaller virtual feet led to an overestimation of their stepping ability. To test whether this age-related difference in body scaling was due to misperception of foot size, adults and children matched virtual shoes to their actual feet size in Experiment 2. This matching task showed no perceptual differences between the age groups. Across our two experiments, we showed that children scale gap affordance judgments differently than adults and this difference cannot be explained by difference in perceptions of the size of virtual feet. The results suggest that children can effectively make perception and action judgments in virtual reality, but do not always do so in the same manner as adults. Such a finding has implications for the design of virtual reality games, educational tools, and training systems that are becoming increasingly common for children.