Should you believe your eyes? Not necessarily in virtual reality says new study

December 14, 2022

Jody Culham

A new study by Western neuroscientists suggests that, unlike true reality, perception in virtual reality is more strongly influenced by our expectations than the visual information before our eyes.

The researchers point to the challenge of online shopping, where customers sometimes mis-estimate the size of a product based on their expectations, discovering for example that a sweater purchased online is indeed lovely but sized for a doll not an adult.

This happens in part because the physical cues to size that are present when seeing an item in a store are typically eliminated when viewing photos online. Without seeing the physical object, customers base their expectations of familiar size on prior experience. Since most sweaters are sized for people, not dolls, the visual system assumes that an unfamiliar sweater is, too.

The advent of virtual reality offers new opportunities for applications like online shopping and also for research on visual perception. But researchers wanted to understand if users of virtual reality perceive size as accurately as they do in the real world.

A research team, led by Canada Research Chair in Immersive Neuroscience Jody Culham, presented study participants with a variety of familiar objects like dice and sports balls in virtual reality and asked them to estimate the object sizes. The trick? Objects were presented not only at their typical ‘familiar’ sizes, but also at unusual sizes (e.g., die-sized Rubik’s cubes).

The researchers found that participants consistently perceived the virtual objects at the size they expected, rather than the actual presented size. This effect was much stronger in virtual reality than for real objects.

Read the full story, by Jeff Renaud, at Western News.