Affordances as a Measure of Perceptual Fidelity in Augmented Reality

The utility of mediated environments increases when environmental scale (size and distance) is perceived accurately. This paper presents the use of perceived affordances—judgments of action capabilities— as an objective way to assess space perception in an augmented reality environment. The paper extends the use of affordance judgments in a similar context from completely virtual environments. In the current study, we asked observers to judge whether they could pass through a holographic aperture presented at different widths and distances, and then to judge the distance to the aperture. We demonstrate that affordances for passing through apertures in a partially mediated environment are similar to those previously measured in an immersive virtual environment and in the real world.