From: steed@dcs.qmw.ac.uk (Anthony Steed)
Subject: Re: SCI: More Vr and Psychology
Date: Tue, 17 Nov 1992 18:43:21 GMT
Message-ID: <1992Nov17.184321.16773@dcs.qmw.ac.uk>
Organization: Computer Science Dept, QMW, University of London



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)