Abstract:
In this talk I will summarize my work over the last year and a half. Previous work at my lab did not find the distance compression effect on blind walking when the virtual environment was a co-located replica of the real environment. We repeated this experiment with a co-located NPR replica environment and did find distance compression. In a following experiment participants were given a full-body avatar and were allowed to see their feet, this resulted in better distance estimation. In another experiment we compared physiological and gait parameters in realistic and NPR stressful virtual environments. I will also talk about my current experiment with manipulating familiar size cues (i.e. resizing the avatar's hands and feet) to see its effect on distance judgements.