Spatial awareness in immersive virtual environments revealed in open-loop walking

Kathleen A. Turano; Sidhartha Chaudhury

doi:10.1117/12.610854

18 March 2005 Spatial awareness in immersive virtual environments revealed in open-loop walking

Kathleen A. Turano, Sidhartha Chaudhury

Proceedings Volume 5666, Human Vision and Electronic Imaging X; (2005) https://doi.org/10.1117/12.610854
Event: Electronic Imaging 2005, 2005, San Jose, California, United States

Abstract

As we move, we receive feedback from environmental information and internal self-motion cues (proprioception). This co-variation serves to calibrate our action system with respect to the environment and is integral in allowing us to know where we are within a body-scaled space. While the calibration established in the real world is robust enough to support walking without vision to a previously seen target, we propose that the action system needs to be recalibrated when scenes are from a virtual environment (VE). We will present results from experiments where subjects walked without vision to targets in briefly displayed scenes from virtual and real environments. The only available feedback from external sources was a single beep emitted at the end of a trial, implicitly signaling the target distance. Unlike performance in the real world, in the initial trials within the VE, subjects’ egocentric reference frame shifted in concert with the changing scene context. Over time, subjects became less dependent on the unreliable scene context and performance in the VE approached that in the real world. The change in behavior over time is consistent with subjects adopting a more consistent external cue (the beep) to calibrate their action systems. Supported by NIH EY07839 to KAT.

Citation Download Citation

Kathleen A. Turano and Sidhartha Chaudhury "Spatial awareness in immersive virtual environments revealed in open-loop walking", Proc. SPIE 5666, Human Vision and Electronic Imaging X, (18 March 2005); https://doi.org/10.1117/12.610854

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