Visual Perceptual Confidence: Exploring Discrepancies Between Self-reported and Actual Distance Perception In Virtual Reality

Virtual Reality (VR) systems are widely used, and it is essential to know if spatial perception in virtual environments (VEs) is similar to reality. Research indicates that users tend to underestimate distances in VR. Prior work suggests that actual distance judgments in VR may not always match the users self-reported preference of where they think they most accurately estimated distances. However, no explicit investigation evaluated whether user preferences match actual performance in a spatial judgment task. We used blind walking to explore potential dissimilarities between actual distance estimates and user-selected preferences of visual complexities, VE conditions, and targets. Our findings show a gap between user preferences and actual performance when visual complexities were varied, which has implications for better visual perception understanding, VR applications design, and research in spatial perception, indicating the need to calibrate and align user preferences and true spatial perception abilities in VR.