Issues with Virtual Space Perception within Reaching Distance: Mitigating Adverse Effects on Applications Using HMDs in the Automotive Industry

Besides visual validations of virtual car models, immersive applications like a Virtual Seating Buck enable car designers and engineers to decide product related issues without building expensive hardware prototypes. For replacing real models, it is mandatory that decision makers can rely on VR-based findings. However, especially when using a Head Mounted Display, users complain about an unnatural perception of space. Such misperceptions have already been reported in literature where several evaluation methods have been proposed for researching possible causes. Unfortunately, most of the methods do not represent the scenarios usually found in the automotive industry, since they focus on too large distances of five to fifteen meters. In this paper, we present an evaluation scenario adapted to size and distance perception within the reach of the user. With this method, we analyzed our standard setups and found a systematic error that is lower than aberrations reported by earlier research work. Furthermore, we tried to mitigate perception errors by a Depth of Field Blur applied to the virtual images.