In indoor environments, having a view from a window plays an important role in human physical and psychological well-being—particularly if the view contains natural elements. In places where physical windows are absent or the view is highly artifact-dominated, virtual windows can potentially play a beneficial role. The current paper presents a research experiment on the efficacy of three monocular depth cues, that is, movement parallax, blur, and occlusion, in engendering a window-like “see-through experience” using projected photorealistic scenes. Results indicate that all three cues have a significant main effect on the viewer's see-through experience, with movement parallax yielding the greatest effect size. The effects of the remaining two cues are largely qualified by their interactions with each other and with movement parallax. These results provide a first step in identifying and testing the perceptual elements that are essential in creating a convincing virtual window.

This paper presents a first study in which a recently reported intermodal perceptual illusion known as the rubber hand illusion is experimentally investigated under mediated conditions. When one's own hand is placed out of view and a visible fake hand is repeatedly stroked and tapped in synchrony with the unseen hand, subjects report a strong sense in which the fake hand is experienced as part of their own body. In our experiment, we investigated this illusion under three conditions: (i) unmediated condition, replicating the original paradigm, (ii) virtual reality (VR) condition, where both the fake hand and its stimulation were projected on the table in front of the participant, and (iii) mixed reality (MR) condition, where the fake hand was projected, but its stimulation was unmediated. Dependent measures included self-report (open-ended and questionnaire-based) and drift, that is, the offset between the felt position of the hidden hand and its actual position. As expected, the unmediated condition produced the strongest illusion, as indicated both by self-report and drift towards the rubber hand. The VR condition produced a more convincing subjective illusion than the MR condition, although no difference in drift was found between the mediated conditions. Results are discussed in terms of perceptual mechanisms underlying the rubber hand illusion, and the illusion's relevance to understanding telepresence.

Virtual environments have the potential to become important new research tools in environment behavior research. They could even become the future (virtual) laboratories, if reactions of people to virtual environments are similar to those in real environments. The present study is an exploration of the comparability of research findings in real and virtual environments. In the study, 101 participants explored an identical space, either in reality or in a computer-simulated environment. Additionally, the presence of plants in the space was manipulated, resulting in a 2 (environment)× 2 (plants) between-subjects design. Employing a broad set of measurements, we found mixed results. Performances on size estimations and a cognitive mapping task were significantly better in the real environment. Factor analyses of bipolar adjectives indicated that, although four dimensions were similar for both environments, a fifth dimension of environmental assessment—termed arousal —was absent in the virtual environment. In addition, we found significant differences on the scores of four of the scales. However, no significant interactions appeared between environment and plants. Experience of and behavior in virtual environments have similarities to that in real environments, but there are important differences as well. We conclude that this is not only a necessary, but also a very interesting research subject for environmental psychology.

We report three experiments using a new form of direct subjective presence evaluation that was developed from the method of continuous assessment used to assess television picture quality. Observers were required to provide a continuous rating of their sense of presence using a handheld slider. The first experiment investigated the effects of manipulating stereoscopic and motion parallax cues within video sequences presented on a 20 in. stereoscopic CRT display. The results showed that the presentation of both stereoscopic and motion parallax cues was associated with higher presence ratings. One possible interpretation of Experiment 1 is that CRT displays that contain the spatial cues of stereoscopic disparity and motion parallax are more interesting or engaging. To test this, observers in Experiment 2 rated the same stimuli first for interest and then for presence. The results showed that variations in interest did not predict the presence ratings obtained in Experiment 1. However, the subsequent ratings of presence differed significantly from those obtained in Experiment 1, suggesting that prior experience with interest ratings affected subsequent judgments of presence. To test this, Experiment 3 investigated the effects of prior experience on presence ratings. Three groups of observers rated a training sequence for interest, presence, and 3-Dness before rating the same stimuli as used for Experiments 1 and 2 for presence. The results demonstrated that prior ratings sensitize observers to different features of a display resulting in different presence ratings. The implications of these results for presence evaluation are discussed, and a combination of more-refined subjective measures and a battery of objective measures is recommended.