Perception of Distance in Virtual Reality

An Archive of a Research Project conducted In the University of Minnesota In Summer 2014 Under CRA-W's DREU program

Home Who am I? What am I doing? Who is my mentor? While not Researching? Final Report

Week Five

Things cleared up a little bit this week even thought it started overwhelmingly. Earlier in the week, Professor Interrante sent us a bit of C++ and Ogre code from a 2009 experiment that she hoped would be helpful for placing targets in the hallway. But understanding the code by itself was very challenging and we didn't know what to do with it until we found a way on Unreal blueprints that would enable us to do the same thing but with much ease. Therefore, we took an existing photograph of a masking tape, imported into the unreal project of the highway and connected it to Blueprint functions which make it appear and disappear at random distances. This piece of tape would be later used in the experiment to test the participant's sense of distance in the Virtual Environment (they would look at it and try to walk to it with their eyes closed)

Fig: Unreal Blueprint for Placing and moving around the Target/ Mask Tape

We also eventually got the hang of the movement component issue we started on last week. All we had to do was make the players view/camera go to randomly set locations by pressing a button instead of going forward and backward smoothly by using the built in movement component. That was really easy to do, but I haven't quite understood how useful that feature would be when it is connected to the head mount device.

Fig: All What We Have Done So Far (Hallway+Avatar+Tape)