Spatial perception in virtual environments: Evaluating an architectural application

An experiment was conducted to compare and explore the relationship between the way people perceive real and virtual spaces. Twenty-four architects toured either a real museum gallery or a realtime computer generated model of the same gallery under one of three increasingly inclusive viewing conditions, i.e., looking at a monitor, viewing through stereoscopic head-mounted displays without and with head-position tracking. Subjects were asked to perform spatial dimension, orientation and evaluation tasks. The most significant results indicate that subjects consistently underestimate the dimensions of the gallery in all three computer simulation conditions when compared to touring the real gallery. The most inclusive viewing condition yields underestimates for spatial dimensions which are significantly greater than the other two simulation conditions