Virtual Replicas of Real Places: Experimental Investigations

• Published in: IEEE transactions on visualization and computer graphics Vol. 28; no. 12; pp. 4594 - 4608
• Main Authors: Skarbez, Richard, Gabbard, Joseph L., Bowman, Doug A., Ogle, J. Todd, Tucker, Thomas
• Format: Journal Article
• Language: English
• Published: New York IEEE 01-12-2022; The Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers, Inc. (IEEE)
• Subjects: Cultural differences; Cultural resources; Human computer interaction; Lighting; presence; psychophysics; Real estate; Solid modeling; User interfaces; user studies; Virtual environments; Virtual reality; Visualization
• ISSN: 1077-2626; 1941-0506
• DOI: 10.1109/TVCG.2021.3096494

As virtual reality (VR) technology becomes cheaper, higher-quality, and more widely available, it is seeing increasing use in a variety of applications including cultural heritage, real estate, and architecture. A common goal for all these applications is a compelling virtual recreation of a real place. Despite this, there has been very little research into how users perceive and experience such replicated spaces. This article reports the results from a series of three user studies investigating this topic. Results include that the scale of the room and large objects in it are most important for users to perceive the room as real and that non-physical behaviors such as objects floating in air are readily noticeable and have a negative effect even when the errors are small in scale.