Influence of Perspective in Virtual Reality

Abstract

Virtual reality (VR) is becoming increasingly popular, both domestically and commercially. The potential domain applications are ever-growing. In the domestic sector, VR is predominantly used for video games, whereas commercially, it is used for training. VR has been used to enable the occlusion of physical space from a user's eyes, and instead replace it with a virtual environment (VE). Most, if not all VR content and applications are viewed using a first-person perspective (1PP). That is, they are viewed as if a camera in the VE is placed at the position of user's physical eyes. Most headset-based VR devices allow users to manipulate the orientation of this camera by rotating their head, and some devices even let users manipulate the position of the camera. Perspective manipulation is common in other digital mediums than VR, but most notably in video games on 2D screens. The most common form of perspective manipulation in video games is to allow a third-person perspective (3PP). This typically allows a user to view a virtual character's body and space around them in a video game. The techniques which enable perspective manipulation do not naturally carry over into VR. There have been few studies which have conclusively determined how perspective influences users in VR.

This thesis is focused on determining how perspective impacts users within multiple areas. The areas focused on in this thesis are task performance, spatial perception, and user presence. These are measured over several domain applications. This thesis also looks at how perspective may interact with other variables, such as display screens and invoked emotion. This thesis progressively investigates several aspects of perspective manipulation with a series of user studies. The thesis presents original research on key components for the design and implementation of 3PP in VR.

Date of Award	17 Feb 2021
Original language	English
Awarding Institution	University of Bath
Supervisor	Eamonn O'Neill (Supervisor) & Yongliang Yang (Supervisor)