Distance Perception in Augmented Reality with Animated Avatars as a Cue

Soumyajit Chakraborty ¹, Haley Adams ¹, Jeanine K. Stefanucci ², Sarah Creem-Regehr ², and Bobby Bodenheimer ^{1
1 Vanderbilt University, 2 University of Utah}

Augmented reality is an important technology for learning and training, particularly in such tasks as navigation and assembly. These tasks typically require that people be able to accurately localize the position of objects in space; in the case of augmented reality applications, these objects would include virtual objects. Prior work suggests that people underestimate the location of virtual objects placed in the real world with augmented reality displays, although the reasons are unclear. What is clear is that virtual objects in current augmented reality displays typically lack some salient depth cues that real objects have. In this work, we test whether motion of familiar size object, namely a life-size human avatar, adds a salient depth cue at distances of 15 to 40 meters. We report our preliminary findings and discuss the implications of our work for augmented reality applications.

Presented this paper at VHCIE workshop at IEEE VR 2020. Here is the link of the paper. The talk can be found below.