IEEE Trans Vis Comput Graph. 2017 Apr;23(4):1399-1408. doi: 10.1109/TVCG.2017.2657235. Epub 2017 Jan 23.
This paper examines how humans adapt to novel physical situations with unknown gravitational acceleration in immersive virtual environments. We designed four virtual reality experiments with different tasks for participants to complete: strike a ball to hit a target, trigger a ball to hit a target, predict the landing location of a projectile, and estimate the flight duration of a projectile. The first two experiments compared human behavior in the virtual environment with real-world performance reported in the literature. The last two experiments aimed to test the human ability to adapt to novel gravity fields by measuring their performance in trajectory prediction and time estimation tasks. The experiment results show that: 1) based on brief observation of a projectile's initial trajectory, humans are accurate at predicting the landing location even under novel gravity fields, and 2) humans' time estimation in a familiar earth environment fluctuates around the ground truth flight duration, although the time estimation in unknown gravity fields indicates a bias toward earth's gravity.
本文研究了人类如何在沉浸式虚拟现实环境中适应具有未知重力加速度的新物理环境。我们设计了四个具有不同任务的虚拟现实实验，让参与者完成：击球击中目标、触发球击中目标、预测抛射体的着陆位置和估计抛射体的飞行时间。前两个实验将人类在虚拟环境中的行为与文献中报告的真实世界表现进行了比较。后两个实验旨在通过测量他们在轨迹预测和时间估计任务中的表现，测试人类适应新重力场的能力。实验结果表明：1）基于对抛射体初始轨迹的短暂观察，即使在新的重力场中，人类也能准确地预测着陆位置，2）人类在熟悉的地球环境中的时间估计在地面真实飞行时间周围波动，尽管在未知重力场中的时间估计表明偏向地球的重力。
