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Experiment Shows Stylized Rendering Enhances Presence In Immersive AR

Posted by samzenpus on from the looks-like-the-real-thing dept.

An anonymous reader writes William Steptoe, a senior researcher in the Virtual Environments and Computer Graphics group at University College London, published a paper (PDF) detailing experiments dealing with the seamless integration of virtual objects into a real scene. Participants were tested to see if they could correctly identify which objects in the scene were real or virtual. With standard rendering, participants were able to correctly guess 73% of the time. Once a stylized rendering outline was applied, accuracy dropped to 56% (around change) and even further to 38% as the stylized rendering was increased. Less accuracy means users were less able to tell the difference between real and virtual objects. Steptoe says that this blurring of real and virtual can increase 'presence', the feeling of being truly present in another space, in immersive augmented reality applications.

4 of 75 comments (clear)

  1. Duh! by nman64 · · Score: 5, Insightful

    It isn't terribly surprising that adding a cartoonish rendering effect to both real and virtual objects would make them more difficult to discern as such. I certainly wouldn't call it more immersive - quite the opposite, in fact. It is extremely obvious that what you are looking at has been altered and that you are not looking at "reality".

    1. Re:Duh! by Animats · · Score: 5, Insightful

      Right. The original post doesn't make it clear that the system applies edge enhancement filters to the "real world" objects as well as the virtual ones. So everything looks crappy. It's not clear what this is supposed to prove.

      Watching the video, the easiest way to tell real from virtual objects is that the amount of lag on the real and virtual objects differs.

    2. Re:Duh! by julesh · · Score: 4, Insightful

      It isn't terribly surprising that adding a cartoonish rendering effect to both real and virtual objects would make them more difficult to discern as such. I certainly wouldn't call it more immersive - quite the opposite, in fact. It is extremely obvious that what you are looking at has been altered and that you are not looking at "reality".

      Right, but "immersive" doesn't mean "difficult to distinguish from reality" but rather "easy to treat as if it were real". I mean, I used to find playing Elite on my Sinclair Spectrum "immersive", but there's not a chance I'd ever fail to know it wasn't real. Being immersive means allowing people to retain what's often called "willing suspension of disbelief" -- as long as the system I'm looking at behaves consistently, I can treat it as if it were real, so I can (at least sort-of) believe in its existence as a real thing. And maintaining that sense of existence is what people mean when they say immersion.

      The filters they applied in the video make the scenes look less realistic overall, but they make them more consistent, and that lets me believe in them as real in a way I can't easily believe in the unfiltered scene.

  2. Re:Porn ... by rebelwarlock · · Score: 4, Insightful

    Everything will be used for porn. That doesn't make it a bad thing. Technology has been driven in large part by sex, and will continue to be. If people think something can be used for porn, they'll put more money into it, and then you can use it for other things too.