Sensory and Perceptual Consistency for Believable Response in Action Feedback Loop

Most Virtual Reality1(VR) applications are dedicated to providing a realistic response to users. Prior works have argued that the importance of credibility or believability to evoke realistic responses. However, there are few empirical works focused on the concept of believability itself. This work further explores the evoke-condition of believability from the views of sensory and perceptual aspects. Sensory believability refers to the actions supported by the Virtual Environment (VE) match with common sense, whereas perceptual believability refers to the behaviors supported by the VE are consistent with the expectation formed during interactions or from prior experiences. Towards the end, an experiment that examines the sensory (rock appearance, environmental visual scene, environmental sound) and perceptual (dynamic behavior) factors of consistency on believable response in a virtual rock climbing environment was conducted. The results showed that the consistency of dynamics features contributed the most to perceptual believability, followed by a higher level of rock appearance along with climbing actions, even with the medium level of the environmental visual scene. In contrast, the medium and higher level of environmental visual scene contributed the most to sensory believability. This study suggests the sensory and perceptual consistency together could evoke the believable response in action feedback loop for VR.

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