In presenting this dissertation in partial fulfillment of the requirements
for the Doctoral degree at the University of Washington, I agree that the
Library shall make its copies freely available for inspection. I further
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Professor Thomas A. Furness
Industrial Engineering
A framework is presented for comprehending partly participants' spatial
perception in virtual environments. Specific hypotheses derived from that
framework include: simulator sickness should be reducible through visual
background manipulations; and the sense of presence, or of ``being in'' a
virtual environment, should be increased by manipulations that facilitate
perception of a virtual scene as a perceptual rest frame. Experiments to
assess the simulator sickness reduction hypothesis demonstrated that
congruence between the visual background and inertial cues decreased
reported simulator sickness and per-exposure postural instability.
Experiments to assess the presence hypothesis used two measures:
self-reported presence and visual-inertial nulling. Results indicated that a
meaningful virtual scene, as opposed to a random one, increased both
reported presence and the level of inertial motion required to overcome
perceived self-motion elicited by scene motion. The simulator sickness
research implies that visual background manipulations may be a means to
reduce the prevalent unwanted side-effects of simulators. The presence
research introduces a procedure, possibly based on brain-stem level neural
processing, to measure the salience of virtual environments. Both lines of
research are central to developing effective virtual interfaces which have
the potential to increase the human-computer bandwidth, and thus to
partially address the information explosion.
Abstract: