[Abstract]

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Although many virtual environments such as the four-wall CAVE are described as immersive, users can still perceive stimuli from both virtual world and real world. One hypothesis is that the exposure to stimuli from the real world may reduce users’ quality of immersion and hence the working performance. This paper presents an experiment to investigate the effect of lowered stimulus in peripheral area on user performance and on the usability of immersive VE. We carefully designed three tasks that cause different levels of awareness of the real world distraction. Using these tasks, we evaluated users’ performance and preference between two conditions: with low and high real world stimuli in peripheral view. The low-stimulus peripheral area was created by draping a black cloth on the missing back wall of the CAVE. The high stimulus distraction was created by projected animations and real human motion. The experiments show that, in different tasks, lowered distraction may have positive or negative effect on user performance depending on specific tasks and virtual environment scenes.