This paper identifies a new phenomenon: when users interact with physically simulated objects in a virtual environment that is much smaller than usual, there is a mismatch between the object physics that they expect and the object physics that is actually correct. We report the findings of our study investigating the relationship between perceived realism and a physically correct approximation of realism in a small-scale virtual environment. We conducted a within-subjects experiment in which 44 subjects performed a simple interaction task with objects, using two physics simulation conditions while scaled down by a factor of ten in a virtual reality application. Although both conditions gave the visual impression of a scaled-down user interacting in a normal-sized environment, the physics conditions affecting the objects were different by simulating either correct behavior at that scale, or incorrect behavior similar to as if a normal sized user was interacting in a world that had been scaled up instead. We found that the significant majority of the users considered the latter condition to be the realistic one. We argue that our findings have implications on many virtual reality and telepresence applications involving operation with physically simulated or physical objects in small scales.
翻译:本文确定了一个新的现象:当用户在比通常小得多的虚拟环境中与物理模拟物体互动时,他们期望的物体物理学与实际正确的物体物理学之间有不匹配之处。我们报告了我们研究在小规模虚拟环境中所觉察到的现实主义和物理正确接近现实主义之间的关系的研究结果。我们进行了一个主题内实验,在实验中,44个主体与物体进行了简单的互动任务,使用两个物理模拟条件,同时在虚拟现实应用中缩小了10倍。虽然两种条件都给人以在正常规模环境中用户互动规模缩小的视觉印象,但影响物体的物理条件是不同的,要么模拟了这一规模的正确行为,要么与正常规模的用户在已经扩大的世界上进行互动的不正确行为类似。我们发现,绝大多数用户认为后一种条件是现实的。我们认为,我们的调查结果对许多虚拟现实和远程应用产生了影响,涉及物理模拟或小尺度物理物体的操作。