@inproceedings{dfe27bcd805e4e81ad68265bf7bb1191,
title = "The Effects of Visual Realism on Spatial Memory and Exploration Patterns in Virtual Reality",
abstract = "Understanding the effects of environmental features such as visual realism on spatial memory can inform a human-centered design of virtual environments. This paper investigates the effects of visual realism on object location memory in virtual reality, taking account of individual differences, gaze, and locomotion. Participants freely explored two environments which varied in visual realism, and then recalled the locations of objects by returning the misplaced objects back to original locations. Overall, we did not find a significant relationship between visual realism and object location memory. We found, however, that individual differences such as spatial ability and gender accounted for more variance than visual realism. Gaze and locomotion analysis suggest that participants exhibited longer gaze duration and more clustered movement patterns in the low realism condition. Preliminary inspection further found that locomotion hotspots coincided with objects that showed a significant gaze time difference between high and low visual realism levels. These results suggest that high visual realism still provides positive spatial learning affordances but the effects are more intricate.",
keywords = "Spatial ability, Spatial memory, Virtual reality, Visual fidelity, Visual realism",
author = "Jiawei Huang and Alexander Klippel",
year = "2020",
month = nov,
day = "1",
doi = "10.1145/3385956.3418945",
language = "English",
series = "Proceedings of the ACM Symposium on Virtual Reality Software and Technology, VRST",
publisher = "Association for Computing Machinery",
editor = "Spencer, {Stephen N.}",
booktitle = "Proceedings - VRST 2020",
note = "26th ACM Symposium on Virtual Reality Software and Technology, VRST 2020 ; Conference date: 01-11-2020 Through 04-11-2020",
}