Assessing Depth Perception in Virtual Environments: A Comprehensive Framework

Understanding humans’ perception of depth and how they interact with virtual environments is a challenging task. This context involves investigating how features of these environments affect depth perception, which is crucial for tasks like object manipulation and navigation that require interpreting spatial information. This article presents a comprehensive (general, extensible and flexible) framework to assess depth perception in different virtual environments to support the development of more effective and immersive virtual experiences. This approach can assist developers in decision-making regarding different approaches for assessing depth perception in virtual environments, considering stereoscopic and monoscopic techniques for visualization. The framework considers parameters such as the distance between the user and virtual objects and the sizes of virtual objects. Metrics such as hit rate, response time, and presence questionnaire responses were utilized to assess depth perception. The previous experiments are presented (anaglyph and shutter glasses), as well as the new experiments, considering cave environments with and without anaglyph glasses.