When moving around in the world, humans can use the motion sensations provided by their kinesthetic, vestibular, and visual senses to maintain their sense of direction. Previous research in virtual environments (VEs) has shown that this so-called path integration process is inaccurate in the case that only visual motion stimuli are present, which may lead to disorientation. In an experiment, we investigated whether participants can calibrate this visual path integration process for rotations; in other words, can they learn the relation between visual flow and the angle that they traverse in the VE? Results show that, by providing participants with knowledge of results (KR), they can indeed calibrate the biases in their path integration process, and also maintain their improved level of performance on a retention test the next day.

To effectively use a virtual environment (VE) for applications such as training and design evaluation, a good sense of orientation is needed in the VE. “Natural” human geographical orientation, when moving around in the world, relies on visual as well as proprioceptive feedback. However, the present navigation metaphors that are used to move around in the VE often lack proprioceptive feedback. To investigate the possible consequences this may have, an experiment was conducted on the relative contributions of visual and proprioceptive feedback on path integration in VE. Subjects were immersed in a virtual forest and were asked to turn specific angles under different combinations of visual, vestibular, and kinesthetic feedback (pure visual, visual plus vestibular, visual plus vestibular plus kinesthetic, pure vestibular, and vestibular plus kinesthetic). Furthermore, two visual conditions with different visual flows were tested: normal visual flow and decreased visual flow provided by a 60% zoom. Results show that kinesthetic feedback provides the most reliable and accurate source of information to use for path integration, indicating the benefits of incorporating this kind of feedback in navigation metaphors. Orientation based on visual flow alone is most inaccurate and unreliable. In all conditions, subjects overestimated their turning speed and subsequently didn't turn far enough. Both the absolute errors and the variation in path integration increase with the length of the path.

In virtual environments the virtual hand may not always be exactly aligned with the real hand. Such misalignment may cause an adaptation of the users' eye-hand coordination. Further, misalignment may cause a decrease in manipulation performance compared to aligned conditions. This experimental study uses a prism-adaptation paradigm to explore visuomotor adaptation to misaligned virtual hand position. Participants were immersed in an interactive virtual environment with a deliberately misaligned virtual hand position (a lateral shift of 10 cm). We carried out pointing tests with a nonvisible hand in the real world before (pretest) and after (posttest) immersion in the virtual world. A comparison of preand post-tests revealed aftereffects of the adaptation of eye-hand coordination in the opposite direction of the lateral shift (negative aftereffects). The magnitude of the aftereffect was 20% under stereoscopic viewing conditions. However, decreased manipulation performance in VE (speed/accuracy) during the immersion with misaligned hand conditions was not found.