{"id":13785,"date":"2017-12-05T07:40:58","date_gmt":"2017-12-05T07:40:58","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.revoscience.com\/en\/?p=13785"},"modified":"2017-12-05T07:40:58","modified_gmt":"2017-12-05T07:40:58","slug":"virtual-reality-users-must-learn-use-see","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.revoscience.com\/en\/virtual-reality-users-must-learn-use-see\/","title":{"rendered":"Virtual reality users must learn to use what they see"},"content":{"rendered":"
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Bas Rokers<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

Anyone with normal vision knows that a ball that seems to quickly be growing larger is probably going to hit them on the nose.<\/span><\/p>\n

But strap them into a virtual reality headset, and they still may need to take a few lumps before they pay attention to the visual cues that work so well in the real world, according to a new study from University of Wisconsin\u2013Madison psychologists.<\/span><\/p>\n

\u201cThe companies leading the virtual reality revolution have solved major engineering challenges \u2014 how do you build a small headset that does a good job presenting images of a virtual world,\u201d says Bas Rokers, UW\u2013Madison psychology professor. \u201cBut they have not thought as much about how the brain processes these images. How do people perceive a virtual world?\u201d<\/span><\/p>\n

Turns out, they don\u2019t perceive it like the real world \u2014 at least not without training, according a study Rokers and postdoctoral psychology researcher Jacqueline Fulvio published recently in the journal Nature Scientific Reports.<\/span><\/p>\n

In 2015, Fulvio found that people were flunking her simple test of three-dimensional perception using a flat screen and standard 3D movie glasses. They were not good at discerning which direction a target was moving.<\/span><\/p>\n

\u201cMost importantly, they confused whether the object was coming toward them or going away from them,\u201d she says. \u201cIt was a surprising finding. Nobody believed it, because it\u2019s not something that happens often in the real world. You\u2019d get hurt.\u201d<\/span><\/p>\n

The researchers decided to move the test to virtual reality to provide more realistic indications of motion in three dimensions \u2014 such as binocular cues, in which slightly different views from the left and right eye reveal depth, and parallax, where closer objects appear to be moving faster than those farther away.<\/span><\/p>\n

\u201cWe thought it was as easy as taking the same object-tracking task, putting it in the virtual environment, and having people do it the same way,\u201d Fulvio says. \u201cAnd they did do it the same way. They made the same mistakes.\u201d<\/span><\/p>\n

Given a one-second snippet of the movement of a small, round target across a plane that stretched away from the viewer at roughly eye level, study participants correctly moved a virtual paddle to intercept the target\u2019s course less than a quarter of the time.<\/span><\/p>\n

What Fulvio and Rokers found was that when most people put on a virtual reality headset, they still treat what they see like it\u2019s happening on any run-of-the-mill TV screen.<\/span><\/p>\n

\u201cThere\u2019s no depth to a computer screen. There are no binocular cues. Close one eye, close the other eye, nothing changes,\u201d says Rokers, whose work was funded by Google. \u201cIf you take that expectation into a VR headset, where you do have binocular cues, you somehow just don\u2019t use them.\u201d<\/span><\/p>\n

Unless you\u2019re trained to use those cues.\u2019<\/span><\/p>\n

Fulvio began giving study subjects visual and audible feedback. Once they\u2019d watched the one-second flight and set their virtual paddle to catch the target, the game would reveal the full path of the target and a cowbell noise for success or swish for a miss.<\/span><\/p>\n

The visual feedback nearly doubled success rates. (The cowbell improved scores, too, but less so.)<\/span><\/p>\n

\u201cThey were getting better, but how were they getting better? What were they doing differently?\u201d Fulvio asked.<\/span><\/p>\n

When she turned off the VR system\u2019s head tracking, taking away the effects of players\u2019 head movements and making them passive viewers, they were bad again. When she gave a little of that freedom back \u2014 restoring the system\u2019s response to head movements, but making the virtual world shifts lag behind players by as much as half a second \u2014 they were still bad.<\/span><\/p>\n

Interestingly, even players who reported keeping their heads stock still showed improvements when the virtual reality system was incorporating the smallest wobbles of their heads into the scene they were seeing.<\/span><\/p>\n

\u201cThese are head motions people make, tiny jitters, that are not planned movements,\u201d Rokers says. \u201cWhen you think you\u2019re sitting still, your head is moving a little bit. And, it turns out, people actually use that information to improve depth perception. It\u2019s tiny. It\u2019s almost involuntary. But the visual system actually exploits that.\u201d<\/span><\/p>\n

The results \u2014 that tiny head movements and typical binocular cues of motion are there for the taking in virtual reality, but that most people only use them if they are actively shown how VR differs from a flat computer screen \u2014 should help virtual reality creators improve uptake of their products.<\/span><\/p>\n

\u201cGoogle packages a virtual reality YouTube viewer with their headset. That\u2019s a passive experience, and not the best thing to do,\u201d Rokers says. \u201cWhat they should be doing is packaging action games with their headset, something that forces users to interact with the environment. That teaches them to use the information available in virtual reality, and treat it more like the real world and less like a computer screen.\u201d<\/span><\/p>\n

\u201cOtherwise you just have a really fancy TV, really close to your face,\u201d says Fulvio, who has moved on to testing the extent to which people\u2019s expectations influence their perception of flat versus virtual depth by having her study subjects watch TV inside virtual reality.<\/span><\/p>\n

Rokers says showing the effects of teaching people to use cues to three-dimensional motion that they are otherwise ignoring may ultimately help refine treatment for vision disorders such as blind spots or amblyopia (\u201clazy eye\u201d) in which the brain can be trained to compensate for perceptual limitations.<\/span><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Anyone with normal vision knows that a ball that seems to quickly be growing larger is probably going to hit them on the nose. But strap them into a virtual reality headset, and they still may need to take a few lumps before they pay attention to the visual cues that work so well in […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":6,"featured_media":10769,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[35,17],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-13785","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-psychology","category-research"],"featured_image_urls":{"full":["https:\/\/www.revoscience.com\/en\/wp-content\/uploads\/2016\/12\/UW-Madision-logo.jpg",736,495,false],"thumbnail":["https:\/\/www.revoscience.com\/en\/wp-content\/uploads\/2016\/12\/UW-Madision-logo-150x150.jpg",150,150,true],"medium":["https:\/\/www.revoscience.com\/en\/wp-content\/uploads\/2016\/12\/UW-Madision-logo-300x202.jpg",300,202,true],"medium_large":["https:\/\/www.revoscience.com\/en\/wp-content\/uploads\/2016\/12\/UW-Madision-logo.jpg",736,495,false],"large":["https:\/\/www.revoscience.com\/en\/wp-content\/uploads\/2016\/12\/UW-Madision-logo.jpg",736,495,false],"1536x1536":["https:\/\/www.revoscience.com\/en\/wp-content\/uploads\/2016\/12\/UW-Madision-logo.jpg",736,495,false],"2048x2048":["https:\/\/www.revoscience.com\/en\/wp-content\/uploads\/2016\/12\/UW-Madision-logo.jpg",736,495,false],"ultp_layout_landscape_large":["https:\/\/www.revoscience.com\/en\/wp-content\/uploads\/2016\/12\/UW-Madision-logo.jpg",736,495,false],"ultp_layout_landscape":["https:\/\/www.revoscience.com\/en\/wp-content\/uploads\/2016\/12\/UW-Madision-logo.jpg",736,495,false],"ultp_layout_portrait":["https:\/\/www.revoscience.com\/en\/wp-content\/uploads\/2016\/12\/UW-Madision-logo.jpg",600,404,false],"ultp_layout_square":["https:\/\/www.revoscience.com\/en\/wp-content\/uploads\/2016\/12\/UW-Madision-logo.jpg",600,404,false],"newspaper-x-single-post":["https:\/\/www.revoscience.com\/en\/wp-content\/uploads\/2016\/12\/UW-Madision-logo.jpg",729,490,false],"newspaper-x-recent-post-big":["https:\/\/www.revoscience.com\/en\/wp-content\/uploads\/2016\/12\/UW-Madision-logo.jpg",535,360,false],"newspaper-x-recent-post-list-image":["https:\/\/www.revoscience.com\/en\/wp-content\/uploads\/2016\/12\/UW-Madision-logo.jpg",95,65,false],"web-stories-poster-portrait":["https:\/\/www.revoscience.com\/en\/wp-content\/uploads\/2016\/12\/UW-Madision-logo.jpg",640,430,false],"web-stories-publisher-logo":["https:\/\/www.revoscience.com\/en\/wp-content\/uploads\/2016\/12\/UW-Madision-logo.jpg",96,65,false],"web-stories-thumbnail":["https:\/\/www.revoscience.com\/en\/wp-content\/uploads\/2016\/12\/UW-Madision-logo.jpg",150,101,false]},"author_info":{"info":["Amrita Tuladhar"]},"category_info":"Psychology<\/a> Research<\/a>","tag_info":"Research","comment_count":"0","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.revoscience.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/13785","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.revoscience.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.revoscience.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.revoscience.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/6"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.revoscience.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=13785"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.revoscience.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/13785\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.revoscience.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/10769"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.revoscience.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=13785"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.revoscience.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=13785"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.revoscience.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=13785"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}