Perception

ISUE Lab perception research examines how people interpret presence, distance, scale, confidence, and environmental structure in immersive systems. These studies help explain where virtual reality interfaces align with user expectations, and where display, tracking, or visual design choices change what people perceive.

Presence

Our work studies how people perceive virtual environments and their sense of 'being there', otherwise known as presence. Interaction fidelity, scenario fidelity, and display fidelity are components that play a role in how people perceive virtual environments and whether they believe they are actually there in the virtual world as opposed to observing the world. With the mentioned components in mind, we have developed the Fidelity-based Presence Scale (FPS), one of the first presence measurement tools that provides insight on what design decisions influenced sense of presence during a given experience [1]. Across our user studies, we have assessed how presence may change in different in-virtual reality tasks such as object manipulation [2] and locomotion [3]. Through our recent efforts within presence, our work aims to provide future researchers and developers directions in how to better assess and evaluate sense of presence and turn key results into actionable items when designing virtual experiences.

Publications

Distance perception

Our work studies how people perceive and judge distances in virtual and augmented reality, with a focus on understanding when immersive systems preserve or distort users' sense of space. We examine how headset characteristics and virtual environment properties, such as field of view [1, 2], video see-through displays [3], visual clutter, indoor/outdoor scene structure, and target distance, influence egocentric distance judgments [4]. Across controlled user studies, we use action-based tasks such as blind walking and blind throwing to evaluate how accurately users perceive spatial relationships in immersive environments. Our research also explores lightweight design interventions, including head-centric rest frames, that can reduce distance underestimation and improve spatial judgment. More recently, we have investigated visual perceptual confidence, studying how users' self-reported confidence and preferences may diverge from their actual perceptual performance. Together, this work provides design guidance for VR and AR applications where accurate spatial perception is critical, including training, simulation, navigation, accessibility, digital twins, and immersive interaction.

Publications