ABSTRACT
Walking through the real world is one of the most fundamental processes of humans, and its consideration in immersive virtual environments (IVEs) is of major importance for many application domains, such as those requiring immersive walkthroughs. This chapter analyzes the triplet of self-motion speed, distance, and time perception in an IVE. During self-motion in IVEs, different cues provide information about the travel distance with respect to the motion speed or time. Humans can use these cues to keep track of distance traveled, the remaining distance to a goal, or discriminate travel distance intervals. Although humans are considerably good at making distance judgments in the real world, experiments in IVEs show that characteristic estimation errors occur such that distances are often severely overestimated for very short distances and underestimated for longer distances. Different sensory motion cues support the perception of the speed of walking in an IVE.
