Functional Similarities in Spatial Representations Between Real and Virtual Environments

Betsy Williams, Gayathri Narasimham, Claire Westerman, John Rieser, Bobby Bodenheimer

Transactions on Applied Perception

Abstract

The two experiments in this paper demonstrate similarities in what people know about the spatial layout of objects in familiar places whether their knowledge resulted from exploring the physical environment on foot or exploring a virtual rendering of it with a tethered head-mounted display. In both experiments subjects were asked to study the locations of eight targets in the physical or virtual environment, then close their eyes, walk (or imagine walking) to a new point of observation, and then turn and face some of the remembered objects. In Experiment 1 the results of the statistical analysis were functionally similar after learning by exploring the virtual environment and physical environment: The new points of observation were simple rotations of the point where they were learned. Like exploring the physical environment, the latencies and errors of the turning judgments after learning the virtual environment were significantly worse after the imagined movements than the physical movements; and the measures were worse for larger degrees of physical or imagined rotation in both conditions. In Experiment 2 the new points of observation differed by simple rotations in one condition versus simple translations in the other condition and again the results were functionally similar after learning the physical versus the virtual environment: In both learning conditions, the errors and latencies in the physical and virtual environments were worse after rotations than translation and varied as a function of the disparity of the direction when learning and the direction when responding.

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