2003 Volume 8 Issue 3 Pages 349-356
Those who aimed to create highly dynamic and interactive virtual reality (VR) spaces assumed that observers accurately localized where stimuli were presented. However, we don't know so much about how accurate people localize the stimuli in such created VR spaces. To investigate the localization, we studied the representational momentum (RM) phenomenon, which was the mislocalization of disappearance positions of the moving target, in VR space. The reasons for dealing with this phenomenon are 1) that this phenomenon could be referred to as the basic component of highly dynamic and interactive VR applications and 2) that because many studies reported this phenomenon in two-dimensional space, we could compare our results with those of the previous studies. This experiment was designed to confirm RM phenomenon not only when a target was presented but also when a static reference was presented with a target. The mislocalizations of the moving target along the horizontal axis were measured in the horizontal and the depth axes. The mislocalizations were observed in the direction of the moving target in the horizontal axis but not observed in the depth axis when the target was approaching to the front of the subjects, whether the reference was presented or not. And the mislocalizations were not observed in both horizontal and depth axes when the target moved away from the front of the subjects. These results suggest that in VR spaces, people would localize the moving target in more forward than the actual position when the target approaches to the subjects' midline. These results also suggest that these biases would be made under VR applications in which perceptions of moving targets interact with other perceptual modalities.
