The Role of Spatial Immersion for Tasks Based on the Use of Egocentric Frames of Reference

Abstract

The focus of the current study was to understand which aspects of 3D immersive virtual reality are particularly useful for tasks based on the use of egocentric frames of reference. Twenty-two undergraduate students learned relative motion concepts in an interactive virtual reality simulation, either in an immersive virtual environment (IVE) or non-immersive desktop virtual environment (DVE). Our results show that the IVE group improved more significantly than the DVE group on solving relative motion problems after training in the simulations. The students' improvement from the pre- to post- problem solving test revealed that, through correlation analysis and rating different scales of presence, only spatial immersion scale showed a significant correlation which favored the IVE. This result supports our hypothesis that egocentric encoding of the scene in IVE is beneficial for tasks based on the use of egocentric frames of reference. © Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg 2013.