Investigating the role of eye-height on space perception in immersive virtual environments

Markus Leyrer, Sally A. Linkenauger, Heinrich H. Bülthoff, Betty J. Mohler

Introduction

Virtual reality (VR) technology is an effective tool for the investigation of how humans perceive space. It allows for the systematic manipulation of visual depth cues that are thought to be necessary for the ability to accurately perceive space, but are difficult or impossible to control in the real world. One of these cues that are difficult to control is eye height.

Goals

In our current project, our research aim is to investigate the influence of eye height on perceived egocentric distances and the volumetric dimensions of a virtual room within immersive virtual environments.

Methods

We conducted two experiments in different VEs – one was conducted in a virtual room, one in an open sparse environment, providing an explicit horizon. In both experiments we used the actual eye height of the participant for the virtual camera or we increased/decreased the virtual eye height by manipulating the virtual camera by an amount of 50cm in comparison to the participants’ actual eye height (Figure 1). The task in both experiments was to give verbal estimates of different egocentric distances to a displayed target. Additionally, in experiment 1 the participants had to judge the dimensions (length, width and height) of the virtual room. In each experiment we provided half the participants with a first person, self-animated avatar to investigate if a virtual body has an influence on verbal estimates of perceived egocentric distances as evidenced in previous work for an action based measure [1].

Initial results

The results of both experiments suggest that eye height has a significant influence on perceived egocentric distances – depending on the provided horizon. For environments with an implicit horizon, the results suggest that the visual system may have developed a compensatory mechanism for decreases in eye height whereas increases in eye height result in an underestimation of the target distance (see Figure 2). Additionally, we found that the experience of having a self-animated avatar does not have a significant influence on verbal estimates of perceived egocentric distances [2].

Initial conclusions

In future research, we will further investigate the influence of eye height on perceived egocentric distances in different environments. Additionally, we will further investigate the influence of self-animated avatars (first- and third-person) on space perception [3,4].

Figures

Figure 1: The virtual environments used in both experiments (in the exploration phase no targets were displayed). It shows all three eye height conditions in each environment for a target distance of 5 m seen from an actual eye height of 1.65 meters. It should be noted that in every picture, the camera angle was lowered by 10° in comparison to eye level to provide good images.

Figure 2: Verbal distance estimates for both experiments averaged across subjects. Error bars represent +-1SE.

References

1. Mohler BJ, Creem-Regehr SH, Thompson WB, Bülthoff HH (2010). The effect of viewing a selfavatar on distance judgments in an hmd-based virtual environment. Presence: Teleoperators and Virtual Environments 19, 3, 230–242.
2. Leyrer M, Linkenauger SA, Bülthoff HH, Kloos U und Mohler BJ (2011). The influence of eye height and avatars on egocentric distance estimates in immersive virtual environments. 8th Symposium on Applied Perception in Graphics and Visualization, ACM Press, New York, USA.
3. Leyrer M, Linkenauger SA, Bülthoff HH, Kloos U and Mohler BJ (2011): Perception of the size of self and the surrounding visual world in immersive virtual environments, Perception, 40(ECVP Abstract Supplement) 209.
4. Leyrer M, Linkenauger SA, Bülthoff HH, Kloos U and Mohler B (2011): The influence of a scaled third-person animated avatar on perception and action in virtual environments, Journal of Vision, 11(VSS Abstract Supplement) 69.

Education

2011 - now Ph.D. Student
supervised by Dr. Betty Mohler & Dr. Sally Linkenauger.
Department Human Perception, Cognition and Action (Dept. Head: Heinrich H. Buelthoff), Max Planck Institute for Biological Cybernetics, Tübingen, Germany.

2008 – 2011 Master Student

Media and Communication Informatics - Reutlingen University, Germany (Overall Grade 1.1).

Graduation with distinction.

2005 – 2008 Bachelor Student

Media and Communication Informatics - Reutlingen University, Germany (Overall Grade 1.6).

1995 – 2004 High School Student

Graf-Eberhard-Gymnasium, Bad Urach (Overall Abitur Grade 1.3).

Work Experience

2008 – 2010 Reutlingen University, Reutlingen, Germany

Teaching in the computer graphics laboratory. Technical assistance and administration of the VRlab. Administration of Student laboratories, support of students, licence administration, server administration.

2007 Forschungs- und Innovationszentrum BMW Group, München, Germany.

Development and projectmanagment of a webbased system for internal order tracking of rapid prototyping parts.