People ’ S Perception and Action in Immersive Virtual Environments

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS I would like to express my deepest appreciation to my advisor Bobby Bodenheimer, who has guided me patiently through my research and encouraged me all the time. Without his guidance and persistent help this dissertation would not have been possible. I also thank him for his insightful thoughts and useful advice in my research and life during the past six years, which help me accommodate my life in a foreign country, build research skills, and prepare for my future career. Bobby, thank you very much for everything I have learned from you. I would like to thank Professor John Rieser for providing deep psychological insights and discussions during my research, which helped me avoid many mistakes in my research experiments. Discussions on the details of my research problems with him always offer me deeper understanding about my research. I would like to thank Benoit Dawant, Bennett Landman, and Bill Thompson, for their valuable advice and guidance through my research and dissertation. Thank Alan Peters for plotting Figure IV.6 for me. McNamara, and Aysu Erdemir for their help on valuable discussions and my experiments. Last of all, I thank my husband, Xianshi Xie, for supporting and encouraging during many long hours. I also want to thank my parents and friends for their supporting during this journey. Figure Page II.1 This figure shows how human determine target distance d using eye height h and angle of declination θ , d = hcotanθ. . III.2 This figure shows the constant errors as a function of distance in Experiment One. The black line shows the ground truth condition for comparison. The other four lines show the small aperture (13.6 •) near-to-far scanning, small aperture far-to-near scanning, large aperture (21.1 •) near-to-far scanning, and large aperture far-to-near scanning methods.