Virtual Reality Trade-off Between Resolution and lnteractivity in Spatial Task Performance

irtual reality displays usually lag far V behind classical computer graphics dis-plays in static image quality parameters, such as reso-lution. Both the popular press and scientific papers often stress that resolution will have to increase greatly before users can experience virtual environments as “the real Experiments comparing search-and-act spatial task performance showed that image resolution is very important in static viewing, but not in immersive VR. Nor did animating the image always improve performance. thing. ” Nevertheless, it is already possible to do some useful work in VR environments. The point we experimentally demonstrate here is that resolution is much less impor-tant for interactive tasks that employ immersive VR, where users can explore the environment by moving their heads and bodies, than it is in classical computer graphics appli-cations, where users can only explore by gazing at a single picture. Swartz, Wallace, and Tkacz ’ have shown, in the context of unmanned aerial vehicles, that frame rate (read: passive camera movement) is more important than resolution for target detection, recognition, desig-nation, and tracking. They call these results “surprising.” In the experiments reported here, we investigated the relative importance ofvarious image parameters like spa-tial resolution (number of pixels per video frame), inten-sity resolution (number of gray levels per pixel), and temporal resolution (number of frame updates per sec-ond).2 Most experimental data concerning these reso-lutions come from classical psychophysics. However, experimental conditions in classical psychophysics fea-ture stationary observers looking at short-term, point-like flashes on stationarydisplays, and are thus far more representative of human interaction with pictures an