A study by Slater, et al., [1995] indicated that naive subjects in an immersive virtual environment experience a higher subjective sense of presence when they locomote by walking-in-place (virtual walking) than when they push-button-fly (along the floor plane).We replicated their study, adding real walking as a third condition.Our study confirmed their findings.We also found that real walking is significantly better than both virtual walking and flying in ease (simplicity, straightforwardness, naturalness) as a mode of locomotion.The greatest difference in subjective presence was between flyers and both kinds of walkers.In addition, subjective presence was higher for real walkers than virtual walkers, but the difference was statistically significant only in some models.Follow-on studies show virtual walking can be substantially improved by detecting footfalls with a head accelerometer.As in the Slater study, subjective presence significantly correlated with subjects' degree of association with their virtual bodies (avatars).This, our strongest statistical result, suggests that substantial potential presence gains can be had from tracking all limbs and customizing avatar appearance.An unexpected by-product was that real walking through our enhanced version of Slater's visual-cliff virtual environment (Figure 1) yielded a strikingly compelling virtual experience-the strongest we and most of our visitors have yet experienced.The most needed system improvement is the substitution of wireless technology for all links to the user.

This paper describes an experiment to assess the influence of immersion on performance in immersive virtual environments. The task involved Tri-Dimensional Chess, and required subjects to reproduce on a real chess board the state of board learned from a sequence of moves witnessed in a virtual environment. Twenty four subjects were allocated to a factorial design consisting of two levels of immersion (exocentric screen based, and egocentric HMD based), and two kinds of environment (plain and realistic). The results suggest that egocentric subjects performed better than exocentric, and those in the more realistic environment performed better than those in the less realistic environment. Previous knowledge of chess, and amount of virtual practice were also significant, and may be considered as control variables to equalise these factors amongst the subjects. Other things being equal, males remembered the moves better than females, although female performance improved with higher spatial ability test score. The paper also attempts to clarify the relationship between immersion, presence and performance, and locates the experiment within such a theoretical framework.

This paper describes the creation of a Western shootout animation for a BBC2 television production. This provides a case study describing the interaction between the TV production team and the animators. The animation was produced by explicitly programming transformations applied to nodes in hierarchical models of simple human characters. A subsequent project has attempted to provide character animation making use of the human body tracking and immersion afforded by virtual reality systems. In the new system a human actor can enter into a virtual environment (VE), act out a role, resulting in a file containing a script. While the script is replayed the actor can enter again into the VE, and interact with the first virtual character, and so on for subsequent replays. The paper describes a first version of this system, and provides a critical examination of the use of VR for creating animations.>

This article presents an interactive technique for moving through an immersive virtual environment (or “virtual reality”). The technique is suitable for applications where locomotion is restricted to ground level. The technique is derived from the idea that presence in virtual environments may be enhanced the stronger the match between proprioceptive information from human body movements and sensory feedback from the computer-generated displays. The technique is an attempt to simulate body movements associated with walking. The participant “walks in place” to move through the virtual environment across distances greater than the physical limitations imposed by the electromagnetic tracking devices. A neural network is used to analyze the stream of coordinates from the head-mounted display, to determine whether or not the participant is walking on the spot. Whenever it determines the walking behavior, the participant is moved through virtual space in the direction of his or her gaze. We discuss two experimental studies to assess the impact on presence of this method in comparison to the usual hand-pointing method of navigation in virtual reality. The studies suggest that subjective rating of presence is enhanced by the walking method provided that participants associate subjectively with the virtual body provided in the environment. An application of the technique to climbing steps and ladders is also presented.