Abstract
In perceptual psychology, estimations of visual depth and size under different spatial layouts have been extensively studied. However, research evidence in virtual environments (VE) is relatively lacking. The emergence of human-computer interaction (HCI) and virtual reality (VR) has raised the question of how human operators perform actions based on the estimation of visual properties in VR, especially when the sensory cues associated with the same object are conflicting. We report on an experiment in which participants compared the size of a visual sphere to a haptic sphere, belonging to the same object in a VE. The sizes from the visual and haptic modalities were either identical or conflicting (with visual size being larger than haptic size, or vice versa). We used three standard haptic references (small, medium, and large sizes) and asked participants to compare the visual sizes with the given reference, by method of constant stimuli. Results show a dominant functional priority of the visual size perception. Moreover, observers demonstrated a central tendency effect: over-estimation for smaller haptic sizes but under-estimation for larger haptic sizes. The results are in-line with previous studies in real environments (RE). We discuss the current findings in the framework of adaptation level theory for haptic size reference. This work provides important implications for the optimal design of human-computer interactions when integrating 3D visual-haptic information in a VE.
Highlights
During daily operation, haptic inputs to the human body, provide a genuine and instant sensory experience for human operators and streamline the intuitive and natural multisensory interaction
The transitional threshold, that is, the point of subjective equality (PSE) at which the participant was likely to report the visual size was larger than the haptic size, was calculated by estimating 50% of reporting of larger on the fitted curve
We studied estimations between visual and haptic sizes when humans actively explore targets and execute certain actions in peripersonal space and in a virtual environment
Summary
Haptic inputs (including force feedback) to the human body (e.g., hands), provide a genuine and instant sensory experience for human operators and streamline the intuitive and natural multisensory interaction. Haptic feedback technology is still relatively under-developed in the quest to approximate the genuine sense of “reality.” it is still a challenge to touch and manipulate various objects (even with force feedback) in VR as we do in the real world, and psychophysics measurements in this regard are lacking To address this problem, sophisticated haptic displays have been designed. The workspace of the haptic device is, from the user’s perspective, different than the typical (remote) working space in which the operators reach their arms; It is necessary to transform and map the sensory properties, such as visual sizes and haptic sizes, and this raises questions regarding gain between different sensory properties To this end, demonstrating how humans perceive sizes, especially when they are conflicting from different sensory modalities in peripersonal space, is an important step that must be made in order to understand how virtual objects or remote objects should be displayed/rendered in during teleoperations
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