ABSTRACT
Although it is useful to identify the role of individual, unimodal perceptual cues on behavior and on perceptual fidelity, creating virtual environments means addressing the problem of real-world perception that is inherently multimodal in character. This chapter focuses on perception as a system rather than a collection of individual sensory processes. This is particularly important as many virtual environments, including vehicle simulators, often provide only degraded versions of one or more modalities or fail to provide stimulation of these modalities at all due to cost or technical limitations. The quantification of the relative contribution of these modalities becomes increasingly important in these instances in which designers must make trade-offs. This chapter will provide a means of quantifying the relative contribution of perceptual cues for individual modalities to aid the design of decision-making process. In addition, the issue of bimodal and multimodal interactions will be addressed.
