Abstract
Virtual reality tends to generalize for the study of human behavior in mobility. It is thus crucial to ensure that perception of space and motion is little or not affected by the virtual experience. Regarding visual perception of distances it is common to differentiate between two types of errors: errors in the estimation of egocentric distance and errors in the estimation of traveled distance. Nevertheless, the majority of studies carried out in this field do not distinguish these two errors. Thus, starting from the hypothesis that these two types of errors coexist in virtual reality, we propose in this study a first approach to remove the current ambiguity between egocentric distance and traveled distance through a continuous pointing task. The distance to be estimated and the speed of movement were varied. By comparing the data collected on eighteen participants to a computational model with two parameters: an initial error parameter (egocentric distance) and a parameter accumulating the error during the movement (distance traveled), we evaluated the weight of each of these two errors in the observed behavior. The results show that it is possible to set up an experimental protocol allowing discrimination between the two types of error. These results also reveal that errors resulting from the perception of egocentric distance are much greater than that resulting from the perception of distance traveled. Finally, this study highlights the importance of considering the issue of spatial visual perception in a less fragmented way and gives a first clue to the fact that the error generally observed in the estimation of the traveled distance would be mainly due to an error in estimating the egocentric distance.
Meeting abstract presented at VSS 2018