IEEE Trans Vis Comput Graph. 2024 Nov;30(11):7245-7254. doi: 10.1109/TVCG.2024.3456165. Epub 2024 Oct 10.
Virtual Reality (VR) systems are widely used, and it is essential to know if spatial perception in virtual environments (VEs) is similar to reality. Research indicates that users tend to underestimate distances in VR. Prior work suggests that actual distance judgments in VR may not always match the users self-reported preference of where they think they most accurately estimated distances. However, no explicit investigation evaluated whether user preferences match actual performance in a spatial judgment task. We used blind walking to explore potential dissimilarities between actual distance estimates and user-selected preferences of visual complexities, VE conditions, and targets. Our findings show a gap between user preferences and actual performance when visual complexities were varied, which has implications for better visual perception understanding, VR applications design, and research in spatial perception, indicating the need to calibrate and align user preferences and true spatial perception abilities in VR.
虚拟现实（VR）系统被广泛应用，了解虚拟环境（VE）中的空间感知是否与现实相似至关重要。研究表明，用户在 VR 中往往会低估距离。先前的工作表明，VR 中的实际距离判断并不总是与用户自我报告的偏好相匹配，即他们认为自己最准确地估计了距离的位置。然而，没有明确的研究评估用户偏好是否与空间判断任务中的实际表现相匹配。我们使用盲目行走来探索实际距离估计与用户选择的视觉复杂度、VE 条件和目标偏好之间的潜在差异。我们的研究结果表明，当视觉复杂度发生变化时，用户偏好和实际表现之间存在差距，这对更好地理解视觉感知、VR 应用设计和空间感知研究具有重要意义，表明需要在 VR 中校准和调整用户偏好和真实的空间感知能力。
