There has long been interest in illusions of self-motion and their perception in virtual environments. Prior work has indicated that an observer's field of view size is an important factor in the perception of self-motion both real and illusory. Restricted fields of view in some virtual reality displays has limited the extent to which this can be studied. In this paper, we discuss a pilot study examining how well observers can discriminate forward motion velocities as viewed through two common, but differing, field of view configurations. We find that observers are quite sensitive to changes in forward motion. The perceived magnitude of this motion is also found to be affected by field of view size with a smaller field of view resulting in slower perceived velocity.

Spatial perception in virtual environments has been a topic of intense research. Arguably, the majority of this work has focused on distance perception. However, orientation perception is also an important factor. In this paper, we systematically investigate allocentric orientation judgments in both real and virtual contexts over the course of four experiments. A pattern of sinusoidal judgment errors known to exist in 2D perspective displays is found to persist in immersive virtual environments. This pattern also manifests itself in a real world setting using two differing judgment methods. The findings suggest the presence of a radial anisotropy that persists across viewing contexts. Additionally, there is some evidence to suggest that observers have multiple strategies for processing orientations but further investigation is needed to fully describe this phenomenon. We also offer design suggestions for 3D user interfaces where users may perform orientation judgments.

The Depth Light solves the problem of not being able to view the real world, without having to remove the Head Mounted Display, accurately and easily. The Depth Light is activated by a button or trigger press on an HTC Vive controller and consists of a Vive controller, an ultrasonic depth finder, a microcontroller (to send measured distances over serial), a web camera, and a mount for the microcontroller and camera. The device works by finding the distance between the device and the nearest real-world object, taking a sum of these distances, and sending this over serial to a computer as an average. In Unity3D, an object is rendered at the distance sent from the micro controller. This object is then textured with the video feed from the web camera. This object's distance changes in the virtual environment in real time as the Depth Lights micro controller sends new information. As the distance changes the scale of the object also changes, this is to keep the object the same size in the field of vision. The data from the Depth Light is handled by a Unity3D plugin. This plug-in handles all the rendering commands and all of the scaling.