Effects of Handling Real Objects and Self-Avatar Fidelity On Cognitive Task Performance in Virtual Environments

Immersive virtual environments (VEs) provide participants with computer-generated environments filled with virtual objects to assist in learning, training, and practicing dangerous and/or expensive tasks. But does having every object being virtual inhibit the interactivity and effectiveness for certain tasks? Further, does the visual fidelity of the virtual objects affect performance? If participants spent most of their time and cognitive load on learning and adapting to interacting with a purely virtual system, this could reduce the overall effectiveness of a VE. We conducted a study that investigated how handling real objects and self-avatar visual fidelity affects performance on a spatial cognitive manual task. We compared participants’ performance of a block arrangement task in both a real-space environment and several virtual and hybrid environments. The results showed that manipulating real objects in a VE brings task performance closer to that of real space, compared to manipulating virtual objects.