Exploring the Impact of Visual Scene Characteristics and Adaptation Effects on Rotation Gain Perception in VR

Rotation gain is a subtle manipulation technique commonly employed in Redirected Walking (RDW) methods due to its superior capability to alter a user’s virtual trajectory. Previous studies have reported that the imperceptible ranges of rotation gains are influenced by various factors, resulting in different detection threshold values, which may alter RDW performance. In this study, we focus on the effects of scene visual characteristics on the rotation gain and rotation gain thresholds (RGTs), which have been less explored in this area. In our experiments, we focus on three visual characteristics: visual density, spatial size, and realism. Each characteristic is tested at two different levels, resulting in a design of eight distinct VR scenes. Through extensive statistical analysis, we find that spatial size may influence user perception of rotation gain in different virtual environments (VEs), though the effect appears to be small. No significant results of sensitivity differences were found for visual density and realism. We show that the short-term temporal effect is another predominant factor influencing user perception of rotation gain, even when users experience different visual stimuli in VEs, such as different scene visual characteristic settings in our study. This result indicates that users’ adaptation effects on rotation gain can occur in as short a time as overnight intervals, rather than over weeks.