Children’s Calibration of Reaching Estimates in Virtual Reality

How children perceive and interact in immersive virtual environments (IVEs) is an important and emerging topic as virtual reality devices proliferate among this age group. How children understand their opportunities for action in an IVE — the perceived affordances of the space — in comparison to adults has, in particular, been rarely studied. This paper addresses this gap by examining children and adults’ reaching affordances in IVEs. We compared how children and adults judge their ability to reach up and out to targets at different distances in an IVE and how feedback from their actions may influence their accuracy. We found that both children and adults tend to overestimate their reaching capabilities, particularly when reaching out. However, by allowing them to actually reach up or out to the targets (action-outcome feedback), both groups significantly re-calibrated their judgments to align their estimates more closely with their actual capabilities. Notably, children exhibited greater initial overestimation than adults but recalibrated at a similar rate. These findings provide novel insights into how children interact with IVEs and suggest that well-designed feedback mechanisms can enhance their accuracy in action-based tasks. This work has implications for the design of IVEs for children, particularly in educational and training contexts, where ensuring accurate perception of capabilities is critical for learning and safety. By investigating both horizontal and vertical reach, this paper contributes to the understanding of affordance perception across age groups in IVEs, marking an essential step in adapting virtual reality technology to younger users.