Manipulation of Motion Parallax Gain Distorts Perceived Distance and Object Depth in Virtual Reality.

Virtual reality (VR) is distinguished by the rich, multimodal, immersive sensory information and affordances provided to the user. However, when moving about an immersive virtual world the visual display often conflicts with other sensory cues due to design, the nature of the simulation, or to system limitations (for example impoverished vestibular motion cues during acceleration in racing games). Given that conflicts between sensory cues have been associated with disorientation or discomfort, and theoretically could distort spatial perception, it is important that we understand how and when they are manifested in the user experience. To this end, this set of experiments investigates the impact of mismatch between physical and virtual motion parallax on the perception of the depth of an apparently perpendicular dihedral angle (a fold) and its distance. We applied gain distortions between visual and kinesthetic head motion during lateral sway movements and measured the effect of gain on depth, distance and lateral space compression. We found that under monocular viewing, observers made smaller object depth and distance settings especially when the gain was greater than 1. Estimates of target distance declined with increasing gain under monocular viewing. Similarly, mean set depth decreased with increasing gain under monocular viewing, except at 6.0 m. The effect of gain was minimal when observers viewed the stimulus binocularly. Further, binocular viewing (stereopsis) improved the precision but not necessarily the accuracy of gain perception. Overall, the lateral compression of space was similar in the stereoscopic and monocular test conditions. Taken together, our results show that the use of large presentation distances (at 6 m) combined with binocular cues to depth and distance enhanced humans' tolerance to visual and kinesthetic mismatch.