Assessing functional realism

This research presents an innovative method for assessing 'functional realism' of interactive Virtual Environments (VEs) in which the same information is transmitted in real and synthetic scenes. The basic premise is that an individual's prior experience will influence how one perceives, comprehends and remembers information in a scene. 120 participants across two conditions of varying rendering quality of a space including varied ratios of objects' association to the scene context, are being exposed to the VE and complete an object-based memory recognition task. The results of this study could have significant implications while identifying areas of an interactive computer graphics scene that require varying quality of rendering.