Minification influences spatial judgments in virtual environments

Distances in immersive virtual environments (VEs) have been commonly reported as being spatially compressed while the same judgments are performed accurately in real space. Previous research has been unable to determine the cause of this spatial compression in VEs. The work reported here seeks to improve spatial judgments in VEs by manipulating the computer graphics in a way that biases distance judgments in a controlled manner, but is unnoticed by VE users. We show that shrinking the displayed image and appropriately rendering the scene to fill in the space resulting from shrinking the image ("minification") causes people to make more accurate distance judgments than they do with normally rendered graphics. Possible explanations for this effect include changes to the visual angle of declination from horizon to targets and changes in familiar size.

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