Posted on May 5, 2019

It is often questioned whether task performance attained in a virtual environment can be transferred appropriately and accurately to the same task in the real world. With advancements in virtual reality (VR) technology, recent research has focused on individuals’ abilities to transfer calibration achieved in a virtual environment to a real-world environment. Little research, however, has shown whether transfer of calibration from a virtual environment to the real world is similar to transfer of calibration from a virtual environment to another virtual environment. Thus, to investigate the differences in calibration transfer in the real-world and VR, we developed a VR simulation that introduces altered optic flow by adding gain to the user’s translation.
The simulation features a virtual room mapped exactly onto a real world counterpart where users are tasked with estimating distances by blind walking to targets. The simulation allows users to calibrate to the altered gain to help improve upon their blind walking target estimation under different perturbations.
Developing the simulation involved modeling and texturing an exact replica of the real world setup and setting up perturbation techniques using an HTC Vive pro Head-Mounted Display and HTC trackers.
The captured data was extracted and filtered based on the walking path each participant took in individual trials for analysis.
Further details of the study can be found in the published articles below.

• Solini, H.M., Bhargava, A., & Pagano, C. C. (2019, October). “Transfer of Calibration in Virtual Reality to both Real and Virtual Environments”. In Proceedings of the Human Factors and Ergonomics Society Annual Meeting (Vol. 63, No. 1). Sage CA: Los Angeles, CA: SAGE Publications.
• Reevaluating Calibration Transfer of Perturbed Optic Flow to Real-World and Virtual Environments. Masters thesis by Hannah Solini