As Virtual Reality (VR) devices become more accessible, a multitude of VR applications engage users in highly immersive virtual environments that feature realistic graphics, real-life scenarios, and self-avatars. Many of these simulations require users to make spontaneous affordance judgments such as stepping over obstacles, passing through gaps, etc. which are shown to be affected by the nature of our self-representation in the virtual world. As the technology for creating self-avatars becomes more widely available, it is important to explore how various affordance judgments are affected by the presence of self-avatars. In this work, we investigate the effects of body-scaled self-avatars on the affordance of passability in a natural setting. We implemented a gender-matched body-scaled self-avatar using HTC Vive trackers and evaluated how passability judgments for a sliding doorway in VR, with and without an avatar, compared to the real world judgments. The results suggest that passability judgments are more conservative in VR as compared to the real world. However, the presence of a self-avatar does not significantly affect passability judgments made in VR. This does not align with previous findings which show that having a self-avatar improves judgments and estimates.

We present an empirical evaluation on how stereoscopic viewing and haptic feedback deferentially affects fine motor perception-action coordination in a pick-and-place task in Virtual Reality (VR). The factors considered were stereoscopic viewing, haptic feedback, sensory-motor congruence and mismatch, and calibration on perception-action coordination in near field fine motor task performance in VR. Quantitative measures of placement error, distance, collision, and time to complete trials were recorded and analyzed. Overall, we found that participants' manual dexterous task performance was enhanced in the presence of both stereoscopic viewing and haptic feedback. However, we found that time to complete task was greatly enhanced by the presence of haptic feedback, and economy and efficiency of movement of the end effector as well as the manipulated object was enhanced by the presence of both haptic feedback and stereoscopic viewing. Whereas, number of collisions and placement accuracy were greatly enhanced by the presence of stereoscopic viewing in near-field fine motor perception-action coordination. Our research additionally shows that mismatch in sensory-motor stimuli can detrimentally affect the number of collisions, and efficiency of end effector and object movements in near-field fine motor activities, and can be further negatively affected by the absence of haptic feedback and stereoscopic viewing. In spite of reduced cue situations in VR, and the absence or presence of stereoscopic viewing and haptic feedback, we found that participants tend to calibrate or adapt their perception-action coordination rapidly with a set of at least 5 trials.

Every task we perform in our day-to-day lives requires us to make judgements about size, distance, depth, etc. The same is true for tasks in an immersive virtual environments (IVE). Increasingly, Virtual Reality (VR) applications are being developed for training and entertainment, many of which require the user to determining whether s/he can pass through an opening. Typically, people determine their ability to pass through an aperture by comparing the width of their shoulders to the width of the opening. Thus, judgments of size and distance in an IVE are necessary for accurate judgments of passability. In this experiment, we empirically evaluate how passability judgments in an IVE, viewed through a Head-Mounted Display (HMD), compare to judgments made in the real world. An exact to scale virtual replica of the room and apparatus was used for the VR condition. Results indicate that the accuracy of passability judgments seem to be comparable to the real world.

This paper details the results of an initial empirical evaluation conducted to examine how stereoscopic viewing and haptic feedback affects fine motor actions in a pick-and-place task, similar to the peg transfer task in an FLS training curriculum for laproscopic sugical training. In a between subjects experiment, we examined the effect of stereoscopic viewing and simulated tactile feedback during the fine motor actions of a participants' actions in the near field on the number of collisions and time to complete the task. We found that stereo and haptic feedback contributed to the effectiveness of task performance in different ways. Specifically, we found that the mean time to complete the trials was significantly higher in the abcense of tactile feedback as compared to when it was present, and the mean number of collisions was significantly higher in the presence of stereo as compared to when it was absent.

With costs of head-mounted displays (HMDs) and tracking technology decreasing rapidly, various virtual reality applications are being widely adopted for education and training. Hardware advancements have enabled replication of real-world interactions in virtual environments to a large extent, paving the way for commercial grade applications that provide a safe and risk-free training environment at a fraction of the cost. But this also mandates the need to develop more intrinsic interaction techniques and to empirically evaluate them in a more comprehensive manner. Although there exists a body of previous research that examines the benefits of selected levels of interaction fidelity on performance, few studies have investigated the constituent components of fidelity in a Interaction Fidelity Continuum (IFC) with several system instances and their respective effects on performance and learning in the context of a real-world skills training application. Our work describes a large between-subjects investigation conducted over several years that utilizes bimanual interaction metaphors at six discrete levels of interaction fidelity to teach basic precision metrology concepts in a near-field spatial interaction task in VR. A combined analysis performed on the data compares and contrasts the six different conditions and their overall effects on performance and learning outcomes, eliciting patterns in the results between the discrete application points on the IFC. With respect to some performance variables, results indicate that simpler restrictive interaction metaphors and highest fidelity metaphors perform better than medium fidelity interaction metaphors. In light of these results, a set of general guidelines are created for developers of spatial interaction metaphors in immersive virtual environments for precise fine-motor skills training simulations.

The need for virtual reality applications for education and training involving bimanual dexterous activities has been increasing in recent years. However, it is unclear how the amount of correspondence between a virtual interaction metaphor to the real-world equivalent, otherwise known as dimensional symmetry, affects bimanual pscyhomotor skills training and how skills learned in the virtual simulation transfer to the real world. How does the number of degrees of freedom enhance or hinder the learning process? Does the increase in dimensional symmetry affect cognitive load? In an empirical evaluation, we compare the effectiveness of a natural 6-DOF interaction metaphor to a simplified 3-DOF metaphor. Our simulation interactively educates users in the step-by-step process of taking a precise measurement using calipers and micrometers in a simulated technical workbench environment. We conducted a usability study to evaluate the user experience and pedagogical benefits using measures including a pre and post cognition questionnaire over all levels of Bloom's taxonomy, workload assessment, system usability, and real world psychomotor assessment tasks. Results from the pre and post cognition questionnaires suggest that learning outcomes improved throughout all levels of Bloom's taxonomy for both conditions, and trends in the data suggest that the 6-DOF metaphor was more effective in real-world skill transference compared to the 3-DOF metaphor.

We empirically examined the impact of virtual human animation on the emotional responses of participants in a medical virtual reality system for education in the signs and symptoms of patient deterioration. Participants were presented with one of two virtual human conditions in a between-subjects experiment, static (non-animated) and dynamic (animated). Our objective measures included the use of psycho-physical Electro Dermal Activity (EDA) sensors, and subjective measures inspired by social psychology research included the Differential Emotions Survey (DES IV) and Positive and Negative Affect Survey (PANAS). We analyzed the quantitative and qualitative measures associated with participants’ emotional state at four distinct time-steps in the simulated interpersonal experience as the virtual patient’s medical condition deteriorated. Results suggest that participants in the dynamic condition with animations exhibited a higher sense of co-presence and greater emotional response as compared to participants in the static condition, corresponding to the deterioration in the medical condition of the virtual patient. Negative affect of participants in the dynamic condition increased at a higher rate than for participants in the static condition. The virtual human animations elicited a stronger response in negative emotions such as anguish, fear, and anger as the virtual patient’s medical condition worsened.

We present a set of demonstrations of current work in the Clemson University Virtual Environments Group involving the development and testing of interactive virtual environments for applications in training, rehabilitation and workforce development. All of these applications are designed to leverage commodity hardware such as HDTVs, game controllers, and the Kinect sensor.

Distances are regularly underestimated in immersive virtual environments (IVEs) [Witmer and Kline 1998; Loomis and Knapp 2003]. Few experiments, however, have examined the ability of calibration to overcome distortions of depth perception in IVEs. This experiment is designed to examine the effect of calibration via haptic and visual feedback on distance estimates in an IVE. Participants provided verbal and physical reach responses to target distances presented during three sessions; a baseline measure without feedback, a calibration session with visual and haptic feedback, and finally a post-calibration session without feedback. Feedback was shown to calibrate distance estimates within an IVE. Discussion focused on the possibility that costly solutions and research endeavors seeking to remedy the compression of distances may become less necessary if users are simply given the opportunity to use manual activity to calibrate to the IVE.

An experiment was conducted to examine the effects of immersion on a spatial updating task in a virtual panoramic environment (VPE). A virtual panorama, such as Google Streetview, is an environment that is comprised of 3D (spherical) images taken at regular intervals in a real world setting. Participants in this experiment navigated the National Mall area of Washington DC in Google Streetview using either a keyboard and mouse or a head-mounted display (HMD) with a head orientation tracker.

Few experiments have been performed to investigate near-field egocentric distance estimation in an Immersive Virtual Environment (IVE) as compared to the Real World (RW). This article investigates near-field distance estimation in IVEs and RW conditions using physical reach and verbal report measures, by using an apparatus similar to that used by Bingham and Pagano [1998]. Analysis of our experiment shows distance compression in both the IVE and RW conditions in participants' perceptual judgments to targets. This is consistent with previous research in both action space in an IVE and reach space with Augmented Reality (AR). Analysis of verbal responses from participants revealed that participants underestimated significantly less in the virtual world as compared to the RW. We also found that verbal reports and reaches provided different results in both IVEs and RW environments.