Visual Realism Enhances Realistic Response in an Immersive Virtual Environment

By Mel Slater, Pankaj Khanna, J. Mortensen, Insu Yu. IEEE Computer Graphics and Applications, 2009

352 citations recorded by the source corpus.

Does greater visual realism induce greater participant presence in immersive virtual environments (VE)? Presence refers to how realistically participants respond to the environment as well as their subjective sense of being in the place depicted by the VE. Thirty-three people were exposed for three minutes to a virtual environment depicting a precipice using a head-tracked head-mounted display system. Seventeen of them saw the environment rendered with real-time recursive ray tracing (RT) that included shadows and reflections of their virtual body, and the remainder experienced the same environment rendered with ray casting (RC), which did not include shadows and reflections. Participants completed a presence questionnaire immediately after their experience, and physiological responses (skin conductance and electrocardiogram) were recorded throughout. Results show that subjective presence was higher for the RT environment than for the RC one and that higher stress was induced in the RT environment compared to the RC one.

Subfields: Cognitive Neuroscience, Media Technology, Human-Computer Interaction

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/241efe78f739978fb2112a782d86577ed32f0b42

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Citations in the corpus

The Ethics of Realism in Virtual and Augmented Reality (2020, background): “In two experiments (Slater et al., 2009; Yu et al., 2012) it was again found that higher quality rendering (real-time ray tracing or a light-ﬁeld based method), compared to lower quality rendering, did not inﬂuence the responses of participants.”
The perception of egocentric distances in virtual environments - A review (2013, background): “It has already been shown that greater visual realism enhances presence and physiological responses [Slater et al. 2009].”
Virtual Superheroes: Using Superpowers in Virtual Reality to Encourage Prosocial Behavior (2013, background): “, stress as measured by skin conductance [1]).”
How we experience immersive virtual environments: the concept of presence and its measurement * (2009, background): “Points 1 and 2 have recently been investigated and it was found that the display of real-time shadows and reflections including those of the person’s virtual body significantly added to subjective presence and appropriate physiological response (Slater et al., 2009).”