Recalibration of rotational locomotion in immersive virtual environments

ABSTRACT

This work uses an immersive virtual environment (IVE) to examine how people maintain a calibration between biomechanical and visual information for rotational self-motion. First, we show that no rotational recalibration occurs when visual and biomechanical rates of rotation are matched. Next, we demonstrate that mismatched physical and visual rotation rates cause rotational recalibration. Although previous work has shown that rotational locomotion can be recalibrated in real environments, this work extends the finding to virtual environments. We further show that people do not completely recalibrate left and right rotations independently when different visual--biomechanical discrepancies are used for left and right rotations during a recalibration phase. Finally, since the majority of participants did not notice mismatched physical and visual rotation rates, we discuss the implications of using such mismatches to enable IVE users to explore a virtual space larger than the physical space they are in.

REFERENCES

• 1: Bles, W., de Jong, J. M., and de Wit, G. 1984. Somatosensory compensation for loss of labyrinthine function. Acta Otolaryngol. 97, 213--221.
• 2: Durgin, F. H., Fox, L. F., Lewis, J., and Walley, K. A. 2002. Perceptuomotor adaptation: More than meets the eye. In Abstracts of the Psychonomic Society, Vol. 7. 103--104.
• 3: Israël, I., Sievering, D., and Koenig, E. 1995. Self-rotation estimate about the vertical axis. Acta Otolaryngol. 155, 3--8.
• 4: Ivanenko, Y. P., Viaud-Delmon, I., Siegler, I., Israël, I., and Berthoz, A. 1998. The vestibulo-ocular reflex and angular displacement perception in darkness in humans: adaptation to a virtual environment. Neurosci. Lett. 241, 167--170.
• 5: Jaekl, P., Jenkin, M., and Harris, L. R. 2003. Perceptual stability during active head movements orthogonal and parallel to gravity. J. Vestibular Res. 13, 265--271.
• 6: Scott A. Kuhl, Recalibration of rotational locomotion in immersive virtual environments, Proceedings of the 1st Symposium on Applied perception in graphics and visualization, August 07-08, 2004, Los Angeles, California [doi>10.1145/1012551.1012555]
• 7: Loomis, J. M., Blascovich, J. J., and Beall, A. C. 1999. Immersive virtual environment technology as a basic research tool in psychology. Behav. Res. Methods, Instruments, Comput. 31, 4, 557--564.
• 8: Betty J. Mohler , William B. Thompson , Sarah H. Creem-Regehr , Peter Willemsen , Herbert L. Pick, Jr. , John J. Rieser, Calibration of locomotion resulting from visual motion in a treadmill-based virtual environment, ACM Transactions on Applied Perception (TAP), v.4 n.1, p.4-es, January 2007 [doi>10.1145/1227134.1227138]
• 9: Pick, H. L., Jr., Rieser, J. J., Wagner, D., and Garing, A. E. 1999. The recalibration of rotational locomotion. J. Exp. Psychol. 25, 5, 1179--1188.
• 10: Razzaque, S., Kohn, Z., and Whitton, M. C. 2001. Redirected walking. In Proceedings of the Eurographics 2001. 289--294.
• 11: Rieser, J. J., Pick, H. L., Jr., Ashmead, D. H., and Garing, A. E. 1995. Calibration of human locomotion and models of perceptual-motor organization. J. Exp. Psychol. Human Perception Performance 21, 3, 480--497.
• 12: Viaud-Delmon, I., Ivanenko, Y. P., Grasso, R., and Israël, I. 1999. Non-specific directional adaptation to asymmetrical visual--vestibular stimulation. Cognitive Brain Res. 7, 507--510.
• 13: Betsy Williams , Gayathri Narasimham , Tim P. McNamara , Thomas H. Carr , John J. Rieser , Bobby Bodenheimer, Updating orientation in large virtual environments using scaled translational gain, Proceedings of the 3rd symposium on Applied perception in graphics and visualization, July 28-29, 2006, Boston, Massachusetts [doi>10.1145/1140491.1140495]
• 14: Betsy Williams , Gayathri Narasimham , Bjoern Rump , Timothy P. McNamara , Thomas H. Carr , John Rieser , Bobby Bodenheimer, Exploring large virtual environments with an HMD on foot, Proceedings of the 3rd symposium on Applied perception in graphics and visualization, July 28-29, 2006, Boston, Massachusetts [doi>10.1145/1140491.1140525]
• 15: Withagen, R. and Michaels, C. F. 2002. The calibration of walking transfers to crawling: Are action systems calibrated? Ecol. Psychol. 14, 4, 223--234.

INDEX TERMS

Primary Classification:
  I. Computing Methodologies
  I.3 COMPUTER GRAPHICS
      I.3.7 Three-Dimensional Graphics and Realism
          Subjects: Virtual reality

General Terms:
Experimentation, Human Factors

Keywords:
Perception, recalibration, rotation, virtual environments