Rotational Recalibration in Immersive Virtual Environments∗

People recalibrate, or adjust, their actions as environmental conditions change. For example, people can easily recalibrate to walking outside on a windy day. Locomotive recalibration, such as walking or turning, has already been investigated in several real world experiments. However, there has been little research of locomotive recalibration in immersive virtual environments (IVEs). This work describes a series of experiments that were created to determine if and how people recalibrate to different rates of rotation in IVEs. The experiments were designed after real world experiments conducted by Pick, Rieser, Wagner and Garing [4]. The results of our experiments show that people do recalibrate to virtual environments in a way that is similar to the way they recalibrate in the real world. In addition, these results verify that IVEs can be an alternative way to conduct traditional real world perception experiments.