Thinking Outside the Lab: VR Size & Depth Perception in the Wild
This work addresses the need for more ecologically valid data on VR perception for developers and researchers, though it is incremental as it extends existing lab-based studies to remote settings.
The researchers tackled the problem of understanding size and distance perception in consumer VR devices outside controlled lab settings by conducting a fully remote perceptual study with 60 diverse participants, finding a near-universal trend of nonlinear distance compression but equivocal results for size matching.
Size and distance perception in Virtual Reality (VR) have been widely studied, albeit in a controlled laboratory setting with a small number of participants. We describe a fully remote perceptual study with a gamified protocol to encourage participant engagement, which allowed us to quickly collect high-quality data from a large, diverse participant pool (N=60). Our study aims to understand medium-field size and egocentric distance perception in real-world usage of consumer VR devices. We utilized two perceptual matching tasks -- distance bisection and size matching -- at the same target distances of 1--9 metres. While the bisection protocol indicated a near-universal trend of nonlinear distance compression, the size matching estimates were more equivocal. Varying eye-height from the floor plane showed no significant effect on the judgements. We also discuss the pros and cons of a fully remote perceptual study in VR, the impact of hardware variation, and measures needed to ensure high-quality data.