The Effect of Gaps Between Displays on Spatial Perception and Cognition Tasks in Virtual Environments

—We propose the concept of Gap Between Displays (GBD) as a component of immersion in virtual environment systems. We hypothesized that GBD may reduce users' task performance in some cases, and choosing appropriate stimuli in GBD can alleviate its negative effects. We performed two empirical experiments to test the two hypotheses. Using a four-screen CAVE™ as the experiment platform, we carefully designed three tasks that cause different levels of awareness of GBD. Using these tasks, we compared users' performance and preference in three conditions. The low-stimulus GBD condition was created by hanging a black cloth across the missing back wall of a CAVE. The high-stimulus GBD condition was created by projected animations and real human motion outside the CAVE. The no-GBD condition was created by a normal usage of the front CAVE wall. The experiment results confirmed our hypotheses and showed that keeping some level of real world distraction may sometimes be better than no distraction at all.