The Plausibility Paradox in Small-Scale Virtual Environments

This paper identifies a new phenomenon: when users interact with physically simulated objects in a virtual environment that is much smaller than usual, there is a mismatch between the object physics that they expect and the object physics that is actually correct. We report the findings of our study investigating the relationship between perceived realism and a physically correct approximation of realism in a small-scale virtual environment. We conducted a within-subjects experiment in which 44 subjects performed a simple interaction task with objects, using two physics simulation conditions while scaled down by a factor of ten in a virtual reality application. Although both conditions gave the visual impression of a scaled-down user interacting in a normal-sized environment, the physics conditions affecting the objects were different by simulating either correct behavior at that scale, or incorrect behavior similar to as if a normal sized user was interacting in a world that had been scaled up instead. We found that the significant majority of the users considered the latter condition to be the realistic one. We argue that our findings have implications on many virtual reality and telepresence applications involving operation with physically simulated or physical objects in small scales.