Effect of Environment Size on Spatial Perception in Virtual Reality

A trend of distance underestimations in Virtual Reality (VR) is well documented, but the reason still remains unclear. Therefore, this paper investigates the effect of differently sized Virtual Environments (VEs) on egocentric distance perception in VR as a potential influence. Verbal assessment, blind walking, and our own proposed method: walk and assess, were compared in an experiment, and blind walking was found to be the most accurate. A virtual replica of a real-life location was created as a transitional environment, while small (15m2), medium (35m2) and large (95m2) rooms were created to investigate the effect of VE size on spatial perception in VR. To establish the differences in estimations between the real world and VR when using blind walking, a study was conducted with the virtual replica and its real life counterpart at distances between 1 and 10 meters. Following this, the three distinct room sizes were used in an experiment to investigate the effect of the size of rooms on spatial perception in VR. The findings showed consistent underestimates of distances, and a trend for underestimation to grow as the distance grows was observed. Similarly, underestimates grew with the size of the environment.