Study on Factors of Distance Estimation at Architectural Presentation Tool in Immersive Virtual Environments

The VR technology has been used as the application of architectural presentation tool in the field of industry. The high immersion and intuitive visual information are the great merits of design evaluation when we are using the virtual environments. But the distortion of distance perception in VR is a problem when the accuracy of distance presentation is required to evaluate the preliminary design concept precisely. In this paper, we have carried out some experiments about distance estimation in the immersive virtual environments to verity the factors and their influence. First, we verify the difference of distance estimation in the real and the virtual hallway. The result showed that subjects underestimate the walked distance in the condition of virtual hallway. At the next experiment about the influence of image-resolution, we have figured out the resolution has affected on the distance estimation in the virtual environments