Perception and cognition in immersive Virtual Reality

In the next future, 3D-CAD methods will be extensively employed in conjunction with 3D immersive displays, so called Virtual Environments (VE). These may dramatically improve the possibilities of visualization and interaction offered by common 2D display CAD workstations. Thus, ergonomic evaluation needs to be made as to how the computer-generated object is represented on 3D immersive display (VE) during the design process and to evaluate the impact of Virtual Reality (VR) aided design applications on user's perceptive and cognitive system. Although it is known that monocular cues and stereopsis can contribute individually, or in combination, to an appreciation of the object threedimensional shape, there is little information on the relative merits of them. This is important in the case of virtual objects since incorporation of some visual cues is associated with a significant computational expense. For instance, the simulation of stereoscopic vision requires two display channels to be rendered in a frame interval. Thus, an understanding of the relative benefits of these monocular and binocular coding techniques helps in judging the overall value of including a particular cue. In so doing, virtual reality application can be tuned and optimised for real time performance. This chapter reports on three experiments performed to examine the effects of different visualization techniques of 3D computer-generated freeform surfaces on subjects’ perceptual and cognitive performance while doing CAD-related activities in an immersive VR system.