home *** CD-ROM | disk | FTP | other *** search
- Path: sparky!uunet!usc!zaphod.mps.ohio-state.edu!uwm.edu!ogicse!news.u.washington.edu!stein.u.washington.edu!hlab
- From: steed@dcs.qmw.ac.uk (Anthony Steed)
- Newsgroups: sci.virtual-worlds
- Subject: Re: SCI: More Vr and Psychology
- Message-ID: <1992Nov17.184321.16773@dcs.qmw.ac.uk>
- Date: 17 Nov 92 18:43:21 GMT
- Article-I.D.: dcs.1992Nov17.184321.16773
- References: <1992Nov13.024356.22726@u.washington.edu> <1992Nov14.011705.12007@u.
- Sender: news@u.washington.edu (USENET News System)
- Organization: Computer Science Dept, QMW, University of London
- Lines: 42
- Approved: cyberoid@milton.u.washington.edu
- Originator: hlab@stein.u.washington.edu
-
-
-
- In <1992Nov14.011705.12007@u.washington.edu> rwzobel@unity.ncsu.edu (Rick Zobel)
- writes:
-
- >Flying: The ability to fly around the space rather than walking,
- >distorts the perception of size and scale.
- .
- .
- [problems encountered when letting people fly]
-
- I've recently been helping setup and guide some experiments to investigate
- degrees of presence that people experience when in a virtual environment and
- we've had similar problems.
-
- In the experiments the subjects had to navigate around a corridor and initally
- we had it set up so that one button press on the 3D mouse put the subject
- into fly mode as opposed to the default walk mode. Unfortunately
- it was quite easy to get accidently press the button with the result that
- the subject could soon find themselves either floating above the floor or
- with their feet under the floor. Sods law then dictated that this would
- happen on our first subject and lo and behold it did. The result was not just
- inconvenience on the part of the user but a near panic as the subject realised
- that she was not on the floor and that her viewpoint was level with the top of
- the door. Subsequent reorientation was very difficult as the subject couldn't
- asssociate her frame of reference with that of the virtual world.
-
- After the experiment the subject's main reason for not feeling present was
- that although the world looked like the interior of a building, moving around
- it was not at all normal and she had to concentrate all the time on transfering
- her required movements into button presses.
-
- This brings us back to the problems with the limitations of our metaphors
- for movement in V.R. If our subject can't count how many paces it is from
- one side of a room to another can they really get a good idea of how big the
- room is?
-
-
-
- Anthony Steed
-
- (Department Computer Science, Queen Mary and Westfield College, London)
-