Virtual Environments ’95

This paper is a preliminary report on a set of experiments designed to compare an immersive, head-tracked VR system to a typical graphics workstation display screen, with respect to whether VR makes it easier for a user to comprehend complex, 3-D objects. Experimental subjects were asked to build a physical replica of a three-dimensional "wire sculpture" which they viewed either physically, on a workstation screen, or in a stereoscopic "boom" VR display. Preliminary results show less speed but slightly fewer errors with the VR display. The slower speed is probably explainable by the overhead involved in moving to and grasping the boom display.