TY - GEN
T1 - A psychophysical examination of swinging rooms, cylindrical virtual reality setups, and characteristic trajectories
AU - Cunningham, Douglas W.
AU - Nusseck, Hans Günther
AU - Teufel, Harald
AU - Wallraven, Christian
AU - Bülthoff, Heinrich H.
PY - 2006
Y1 - 2006
N2 - Virtual Reality (VR) is increasingly being used in industry, medicine, entertainment, education, and research. It is generally critical that the VR setups produce behavior that closely resembles real world behavior. One part of any task is the ability to control our posture. Since postural control is well studied in the real world and is known to be strongly influenced by visual information, it is an ideal metric for examining the behavioral fidelity of VR setups. Moreover, VR-based experiments on postural control can provide fundamental new insights into human perception and cognition. Here, we employ the "swinging room paradigm" to validate a specific VR setup. Furthermore, we systematically examined a larger range of room oscillations than previously studied in any single setup. We also introduce several new methods and analyses that were specifically designed to optimize the detection of synchronous swinging between the observer and the virtual room. The results show that the VR setup has a very high behavioral fidelity and that increases in swinging room amplitude continue to produce increases in body sway even at very large room displacements (+/-80 cm). Finally, the combination of new methods proved to be a very robust, reliable, and sensitive way of measuring body sway.
AB - Virtual Reality (VR) is increasingly being used in industry, medicine, entertainment, education, and research. It is generally critical that the VR setups produce behavior that closely resembles real world behavior. One part of any task is the ability to control our posture. Since postural control is well studied in the real world and is known to be strongly influenced by visual information, it is an ideal metric for examining the behavioral fidelity of VR setups. Moreover, VR-based experiments on postural control can provide fundamental new insights into human perception and cognition. Here, we employ the "swinging room paradigm" to validate a specific VR setup. Furthermore, we systematically examined a larger range of room oscillations than previously studied in any single setup. We also introduce several new methods and analyses that were specifically designed to optimize the detection of synchronous swinging between the observer and the virtual room. The results show that the VR setup has a very high behavioral fidelity and that increases in swinging room amplitude continue to produce increases in body sway even at very large room displacements (+/-80 cm). Finally, the combination of new methods proved to be a very robust, reliable, and sensitive way of measuring body sway.
KW - Applied perception
KW - Computer graphics
KW - Human-computer interface
KW - Postural stability
KW - Swinging room
UR - http://www.scopus.com/inward/record.url?scp=33750095986&partnerID=8YFLogxK
UR - http://www.scopus.com/inward/citedby.url?scp=33750095986&partnerID=8YFLogxK
U2 - 10.1109/VR.2006.14
DO - 10.1109/VR.2006.14
M3 - Conference contribution
AN - SCOPUS:33750095986
SN - 1424402247
SN - 9781424402243
T3 - Proceedings - IEEE Virtual Reality
SP - 111
EP - 118
BT - IEEE Virtual Reality, Haptics Symposium and Symposium on 3D User Interface, 2006
PB - IEEE Computer Society
T2 - IEEE Virtual Reality 2006
Y2 - 25 March 2006 through 29 March 2006
ER -