Distance perception in immersive virtual environments, revisited

Numerous previous studies have suggested that distances appear to be compressed in immersive virtual environments presented via head mounted display systems, relative to in the real world. However, the principal factors that are responsible for this phenomenon have remained largely unidentified. In this paper we shed some new light on this intriguing problem by reporting the results of two recent experiments in which we assess egocentric distance perception in a high fidelity, low latency, immersive virtual environment that represents an exact virtual replica of the participant's concurrently occupied real environment. Under these novel conditions, we make the startling discovery that distance perception appears not to be significantly compressed in the immersive virtual environment, relative to in the real world.