From: dstampe@psych.toronto.edu (Dave Stampe)
Subject: Re: SCI: Immersion & Head coupling
Date: Fri, 19 Mar 1993 14:05:11 GMT
Organization: Department of Psychology, University of Toronto



Kristin_Becker.Edu@mailgate.sfsu.edu writes:
>
>Dr Herb Zettl, who is well known for his work on television aesthetics,
>recently presented a paper at the Westren States Communication
>Association's Annual Conference ( 2/14/93, Albuquerque, MN) on the
>Aesthetics of VR.
>
>He presented an interesting point that I would like to add to the
>discussion.  He states that due to our "kinsethetic sensations and
>automatic application of the figure/groung principle" that "we watch
>rather than enter the displayed environment" in a virtual reality.  I
>thought of this comment while reading the message above.
>
>What I believe he is saying, very basically, is that immersion, any
>more than that is found in a television experience, won't be possible
>unless our kinsethetics senses detect as much movement as is happening
>on the screen, thus creating the feeling that we are in motion.
>Knowing that we are at rest while being shown subjective movement on a
>TV screen is one of the ways we use to determine that the experience is
>not real.
[...]
>
Some very important points were missed here.  First, relatively small 
motions (say, 100 cm) under computer control can adequately fool the
human vestibular system into beleiving it is under motion, accelaration,
etc.  Secondly, (and this is the figure/ground principle) with
an immersive HMD (or very wide screen) you don't _see_ any nonmoving
"ground", so figure/ground as with TV does not apply at all.

Even without simulating motion, wide-angle headmounted displays are 
quite good at causing a sense of motion.  The human vestibular 
system stops sensing motion at a constant speed after a few seconds,
and visual motion sensing takes over. 

Sounds like he's never tried a really wide-angle HMD, or read a lot of the
human visual spatial localization literature.  Extrapolating from small
TV displays to 100 degree or greater fields of view is not simple-- the
only proper way is to experiment with it (as has been done by I. Howard
at York).


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| My life is Hardware,                    |         Dave Stampe          | 
| my destiny is Software,                 | dstampe@psych.toronto.edu    |
| my CPU is Wetware...                    | dstampe@sunee.uwaterloo.ca   | 
| Am I a techno-psychologist, or just a psycho-engineer ??               |
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