Field-of-View Restriction to Reduce VR Sickness Does Not Impede Spatial Learning in Women

2021 ◽  
Vol 18 (2) ◽  
pp. 1-17
Author(s):  
Isayas Berhe Adhanom ◽  
Majed Al-Zayer ◽  
Paul Macneilage ◽  
Eelke Folmer

Women are more likely to experience virtual reality (VR) sickness than men, which could pose a major challenge to the mass market success of VR. Because VR sickness often results from a visual-vestibular conflict, an effective strategy to mitigate conflict is to restrict the user’s field-of-view (FOV) during locomotion. Sex differences in spatial cognition have been well researched, with several studies reporting that men exhibit better spatial navigation performance in desktop three-dimensional environments than women. However, additional research suggests that this sex difference can be mitigated by providing a larger FOV as this increases the availability of landmarks, which women tend to rely on more than men. Though FOV restriction is already a widely used strategy for VR headsets to minimize VR sickness, it is currently not well understood if it impedes spatial learning in women due to decreased availability of landmarks. Our study (n=28, 14 men and 14 women) found that a dynamic FOV restrictor was equally effective in reducing VR sickness in both sexes, and no sex differences in VR sickness incidence were found. Our study did find a sex difference in spatial learning ability, but an FOV restrictor did not impede spatial learning in either sex.

2020 ◽  
Author(s):  
Mohammad H Babini ◽  
Vladimir V Kulish ◽  
Hamidreza Namazi

BACKGROUND Education and learning are the most important goals of all universities. For this purpose, lecturers use various tools to grab the attention of students and improve their learning ability. Virtual reality refers to the subjective sensory experience of being immersed in a computer-mediated world, and has recently been implemented in learning environments. OBJECTIVE The aim of this study was to analyze the effect of a virtual reality condition on students’ learning ability and physiological state. METHODS Students were shown 6 sets of videos (3 videos in a two-dimensional condition and 3 videos in a three-dimensional condition), and their learning ability was analyzed based on a subsequent questionnaire. In addition, we analyzed the reaction of the brain and facial muscles of the students during both the two-dimensional and three-dimensional viewing conditions and used fractal theory to investigate their attention to the videos. RESULTS The learning ability of students was increased in the three-dimensional condition compared to that in the two-dimensional condition. In addition, analysis of physiological signals showed that students paid more attention to the three-dimensional videos. CONCLUSIONS A virtual reality condition has a greater effect on enhancing the learning ability of students. The analytical approach of this study can be further extended to evaluate other physiological signals of subjects in a virtual reality condition.


2014 ◽  
Vol 10 (2) ◽  
pp. 20140026 ◽  
Author(s):  
Mélanie F. Guigueno ◽  
Danielle A. Snow ◽  
Scott A. MacDougall-Shackleton ◽  
David F. Sherry

Brown-headed cowbirds ( Molothrus ater ) are obligate brood parasites. Only females search for host nests and they find host nests one or more days before placing eggs in them. Past work has shown that females have a larger hippocampus than males, but sex differences in spatial cognition have not been extensively investigated. We tested cowbirds for sex and seasonal differences in spatial memory on a foraging task with an ecologically relevant retention interval. Birds were trained to find one rewarded location among 25 after 24 h. Females made significantly fewer errors than males and took more direct paths to the rewarded location than males. Females and males showed similar search times, indicating there was no sex difference in motivation. This sex difference in spatial cognition is the reverse of that observed in some polygynous mammals and is consistent with the hypothesis that spatial cognition is adaptively specialized in this brood-parasitic species.


2020 ◽  
Vol 10 (7) ◽  
pp. 446
Author(s):  
Nico Marek ◽  
Stefan Pollmann

In visual search, participants can incidentally learn spatial target-distractor configurations, leading to shorter search times for repeated compared to novel configurations. Usually, this is tested within the limited visual field provided by a computer monitor. While contextual cueing is typically investigated on two-dimensional screens, we present for the first time an implementation of a classic contextual cueing task (search for a T-shape among L-shapes) in a three-dimensional virtual environment. This enabled us to test if the typical finding of incidental learning of repeated search configurations, manifested by shorter search times, would hold in a three-dimensional virtual reality (VR) environment. One specific aspect that was tested by combining virtual reality and contextual cueing was if contextual cueing would hold for targets outside the initial field of view (FOV), requiring head movements to be found. In keeping with two-dimensional search studies, reduced search times were observed after the first epoch and remained stable in the remaining experiment. Importantly, comparable search time reductions were observed for targets both within and outside of the initial FOV. The results show that a repeated distractors-only configuration in the initial FOV can guide search for target locations requiring a head movement to be seen.


10.2196/17945 ◽  
2020 ◽  
Vol 22 (6) ◽  
pp. e17945 ◽  
Author(s):  
Mohammad H Babini ◽  
Vladimir V Kulish ◽  
Hamidreza Namazi

Background Education and learning are the most important goals of all universities. For this purpose, lecturers use various tools to grab the attention of students and improve their learning ability. Virtual reality refers to the subjective sensory experience of being immersed in a computer-mediated world, and has recently been implemented in learning environments. Objective The aim of this study was to analyze the effect of a virtual reality condition on students’ learning ability and physiological state. Methods Students were shown 6 sets of videos (3 videos in a two-dimensional condition and 3 videos in a three-dimensional condition), and their learning ability was analyzed based on a subsequent questionnaire. In addition, we analyzed the reaction of the brain and facial muscles of the students during both the two-dimensional and three-dimensional viewing conditions and used fractal theory to investigate their attention to the videos. Results The learning ability of students was increased in the three-dimensional condition compared to that in the two-dimensional condition. In addition, analysis of physiological signals showed that students paid more attention to the three-dimensional videos. Conclusions A virtual reality condition has a greater effect on enhancing the learning ability of students. The analytical approach of this study can be further extended to evaluate other physiological signals of subjects in a virtual reality condition.


2016 ◽  
Vol 371 (1697) ◽  
pp. 20150251 ◽  
Author(s):  
Andrew J. Parker

Many aspects of our perceptual experience are dominated by the fact that our two eyes point forward. Whilst the location of our eyes leaves the environment behind our head inaccessible to vision, co-ordinated use of our two eyes gives us direct access to the three-dimensional structure of the scene in front of us, through the mechanism of stereoscopic vision. Scientific understanding of the different brain regions involved in stereoscopic vision and three-dimensional spatial cognition is changing rapidly, with consequent influences on fields as diverse as clinical practice in ophthalmology and the technology of virtual reality devices. This article is part of the themed issue ‘Vision in our three-dimensional world’.


2021 ◽  
Vol 11 (13) ◽  
pp. 6146
Author(s):  
Xiaozhou Zhou ◽  
Yu Jin ◽  
Lesong Jia ◽  
Chengqi Xue

In virtual reality, users’ input and output interactions are carried out in a three-dimensional space, and bare-hand click interaction is one of the most common interaction methods. Apart from the limitations of the device, the movements of bare-hand click interaction in virtual reality involve head, eye, and hand movements. Consequently, clicking performance varies among locations in the binocular field of view. In this study, we explored the optimal interaction area of hand–eye coordination within the binocular field of view in a 3D virtual environment (VE), and implemented a bare-hand click experiment in a VE combining click performance data, namely, click accuracy and click duration, following a gradient descent method. The experimental results show that click performance is significantly influenced by the area where the target is located. The performance data and subjective preferences for clicks show a high degree of consistency. Combining reaction time and click accuracy, the optimal operating area for bare-hand clicking in virtual reality is from 20° to the left to 30° to the right horizontally and from 15° in the upward direction to 20° in the downward direction vertically. The results of this study have implications for guidelines and applications for bare-hand click interaction interface designs in the proximal space of virtual reality.


2015 ◽  
Author(s):  
Madis Vasser ◽  
Markus Kängsepp ◽  
Jaan Aru

In the present change blindness study subjects explored stereoscopic three dimensional (3D) environments through a virtual reality (VR) headset. A novel method that tracked the subjects' head movements was used for inducing changes in the scene whenever the changing object was out of the field of view. The effect of change location (foreground or background in 3D depth) on change blindness was investigated. Two experiments were conducted, one in the lab (n = 50) and the other online (n = 25). Up to 25% of the changes were undetected and the mean overall search time was 27 seconds in the lab study. Results indicated significantly lower change detection success and more change cycles if the changes occurred in the background, with no differences in overall search times. The results confirm findings from previous studies and extend them to 3D environments. The study also demonstrates the feasibility of online VR experiments.


Author(s):  
Badrinath Roysam ◽  
Hakan Ancin ◽  
Douglas E. Becker ◽  
Robert W. Mackin ◽  
Matthew M. Chestnut ◽  
...  

This paper summarizes recent advances made by this group in the automated three-dimensional (3-D) image analysis of cytological specimens that are much thicker than the depth of field, and much wider than the field of view of the microscope. The imaging of thick samples is motivated by the need to sample large volumes of tissue rapidly, make more accurate measurements than possible with 2-D sampling, and also to perform analysis in a manner that preserves the relative locations and 3-D structures of the cells. The motivation to study specimens much wider than the field of view arises when measurements and insights at the tissue, rather than the cell level are needed.The term “analysis” indicates a activities ranging from cell counting, neuron tracing, cell morphometry, measurement of tracers, through characterization of large populations of cells with regard to higher-level tissue organization by detecting patterns such as 3-D spatial clustering, the presence of subpopulations, and their relationships to each other. Of even more interest are changes in these parameters as a function of development, and as a reaction to external stimuli. There is a widespread need to measure structural changes in tissue caused by toxins, physiologic states, biochemicals, aging, development, and electrochemical or physical stimuli. These agents could affect the number of cells per unit volume of tissue, cell volume and shape, and cause structural changes in individual cells, inter-connections, or subtle changes in higher-level tissue architecture. It is important to process large intact volumes of tissue to achieve adequate sampling and sensitivity to subtle changes. It is desirable to perform such studies rapidly, with utmost automation, and at minimal cost. Automated 3-D image analysis methods offer unique advantages and opportunities, without making simplifying assumptions of tissue uniformity, unlike random sampling methods such as stereology.12 Although stereological methods are known to be statistically unbiased, they may not be statistically efficient. Another disadvantage of sampling methods is the lack of full visual confirmation - an attractive feature of image analysis based methods.


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