Spatial Scale Perception for Design Tasks in Virtual Reality

We present a user study exploring spatial scale perception for design tasks by simulating different levels of eye heights (EHs) and inter-pupillary distances (IPDs) in a virtual environment. The study examined two levels of spatial scale perception of two-year-old children and adults for a chair scale estimation task. This was to provide appropriate perspectives to enable a suitable estimation of the virtual object scale for the target group during the design process. We found that the disparity between the perspective taken and the target user group had a significant impact on the resulting scale of the chairs. Our key contribution is in providing evidence to support that experiencing different spatial scale perception in VR has the potential to improve the designer's understanding of the end-user's perspective during the design process.