Methods for Evaluating Depth Perception in a Large-Screen Immersive Display

We perform an experiment on distance perception in a large-screen display immersive virtual environment. Large-screen displays typically make direct blind walking tasks impossible, despite them being a popular distance response measure in the real world and in head-mounted displays. We use a movable large-screen display to compare direct blind walking and indirect triangulated pointing with monoscopic viewing. We find that participants judged distances to be 89.4% ± 28.7% and 108.5% ± 44.9% of their actual distances in the direct blind walking and triangulated pointing conditions, respectively. However, we find no statistically significant difference between these approaches. This work adds to the limited number of research studies on egocentric distance judgments with a large display wall for distances of 3-5 meters. It is the first, to our knowledge, to perform direct blind walking with a large display.