Exploring the Influence of a Virtual Body on Spatial Awareness

by Mark Draper

CHAPTER 1: INTRODUCTION

Virtual reality (VR) offers its participants many freedoms that are not possible in the real world. One can vary the environment to be experienced at a moment's notice, to go from standing in a laboratory room, to maneuvering the jungles of the Amazon, to exploring the barren stretches on Mars. With the click of a button, the mode of traveling can also be instantly changed from walking, to flying, even to swimming. Time can be made to stand still, move backwards, or be accelerated tremendously.

The possibilities for self-representation are also equally limitless. In the physical world, a person is connected to his/her own body. It goes where that person goes and unavoidingly blocks the view when one looks at the surrounding environment in his/her vicinity. In VR, a participant can vary the size of his/her body, the shape and form of that body, and how much of a `virtual' body (VB) is desired. One can even determine if he/she wants a VB representation at all. As Slater and Usoh (1994) surmised, VR does indeed offer a challenge to the everyday relationship between mind and body.

The representation of self is fundamental to virtual interface design. A design engineer who is developing a VR navigational environment needs to know if the performance benefits outweigh the hardware/software costs for each potential virtual element involved. One major element to be considered is the VB. The existence of a VB may or may not have performance effects that warrant the extra hardware and software necessary to include it in a VR system. Therefore, an effort must be made to determine the potential benefits of including a VB in VR tasks/environments, so that informed design decisions can be made.

The list of possible VB benefits/effects is indeed a long one. This thesis investigates one aspect of self-representation in VR: the potential enhancement of one's spatial awareness through the existence of a VB. The findings from this research could provide guidelines for this VB cost/benefit tradeoff, aiding VR design decisions.

University of Washington's Human Interface Technology Laboratory (HITL) was recently awarded a contract from the Air Force Office of Scientific Research (AFOSR). Given that this AFOSR contract is focused on unique methods of transmitting situation awareness (SA) in VR (Furness & Barfield, 1993) and assuming that spatial awareness is a subset of SA, the following general research question is proposed:

Does the existence of a VB in a virtual environment enhance one's spatial awareness of that environment?

For this work, a VB is defined as the representation of one's own body (or a subset of it) that can be self-viewed while in a virtual world. Spatial awareness is defined as knowledge of the location of objects in the immediate surroundings relative to a participant's location.

This document begins with a detailed review of the literature in the areas of VBs, spatial awareness, peripheral vision, and ecological psychology. Chapter 2 presents an overview of the flow of logic leading to this specific research question. Next, three studies will be presented and the results discussed (chapters 3 through 5). A general discussion of the overall findings and recommendations for future research will ensue in chapter 6, followed by a conclusion (chapter 7).