A full-body avatar improves distance judgments in virtual environments

Distance judgments are compressed in HMD-based virtual environments (e.g., [Loomis and Knapp 2003]). A user’s own body is almost never rendered in HMD-based VEs, and we hypothesize that this may contribute to perceptual distortions in such systems. In the real world, a view of one’s body is not necessary in order to make accurate spatial judgments, at least about egocentric distance [Creem-Regehr et al. 2005]. However, there are several reasons why the visibility of a user’s body may affect the perceptual fidelity of virtual environments, where other sensory information supporting space perception is less compelling. First, the visual and/or proprioceptive feedback associated with an awareness of one’s body could provide a metric for scaling of absolute dimensions of space. Second the presence of the body in the VE could serve to ground or situate the user in the VE, acting as a frame of reference.