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Displays Technology

Experiment Shows Stylized Rendering Enhances Presence In Immersive AR 75

Posted by samzenpus from the looks-like-the-real-thing dept.
An anonymous reader writes William Steptoe, a senior researcher in the Virtual Environments and Computer Graphics group at University College London, published a paper (PDF) detailing experiments dealing with the seamless integration of virtual objects into a real scene. Participants were tested to see if they could correctly identify which objects in the scene were real or virtual. With standard rendering, participants were able to correctly guess 73% of the time. Once a stylized rendering outline was applied, accuracy dropped to 56% (around change) and even further to 38% as the stylized rendering was increased. Less accuracy means users were less able to tell the difference between real and virtual objects. Steptoe says that this blurring of real and virtual can increase 'presence', the feeling of being truly present in another space, in immersive augmented reality applications.
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Experiment Shows Stylized Rendering Enhances Presence In Immersive AR More

Experiment Shows Stylized Rendering Enhances Presence In Immersive AR

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  • Porn ... (Score:3)

    by chuckugly ( 2030942 ) on Friday October 03, 2014 @12:47AM (#48053621)
    "A natural next step would be to add haptic feedback allowing users to touch virtual objects. Users could pick up physical items and computer generated ones at the same time while still thinking both are real. Adding the ability to walk around would expand one’s sense of presence as well. This allows individuals to explore computer generated environments further immersing them into the experience." - Article

    Yeah, it's for porn

    • Re:Porn ... (Score:5, Insightful)

      by rebelwarlock ( 1319465 ) on Friday October 03, 2014 @12:50AM (#48053631)
      Everything will be used for porn. That doesn't make it a bad thing. Technology has been driven in large part by sex, and will continue to be. If people think something can be used for porn, they'll put more money into it, and then you can use it for other things too.
      • Better driven by sex than by war. Most big tech innovations have come out of "defense" R&D.
    • I still don't understand the bit about "Immersive Accounts Receivable".

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by qwijibo ( 101731 )

        Understandable - the concept of immersive is really hard to explain to accountants. It's probably similar to the arousal you would feel from balancing your checkbook.

    • "A natural next step would be to add haptic feedback allowing users to touch virtual objects. Users could pick up physical items and computer generated ones at the same time while still thinking both are real. Adding the ability to walk around would expand one’s sense of presence as well. This allows individuals to explore computer generated environments further immersing them into the experience." - Aristotle

  • Duh! (Score:5, Insightful)

    by nman64 ( 912054 ) on Friday October 03, 2014 @12:50AM (#48053629) Homepage

    It isn't terribly surprising that adding a cartoonish rendering effect to both real and virtual objects would make them more difficult to discern as such. I certainly wouldn't call it more immersive - quite the opposite, in fact. It is extremely obvious that what you are looking at has been altered and that you are not looking at "reality".

    • Re:Duh! (Score:5, Insightful)

      by Animats ( 122034 ) on Friday October 03, 2014 @02:05AM (#48053825) Homepage

      Right. The original post doesn't make it clear that the system applies edge enhancement filters to the "real world" objects as well as the virtual ones. So everything looks crappy. It's not clear what this is supposed to prove.

      Watching the video, the easiest way to tell real from virtual objects is that the amount of lag on the real and virtual objects differs.

      • And since this is a camera passthrough, not an optical overlay, that's a glaring implementation flaw. Properly aligning the head tracking framerate, camera framerate, and rendering would let them render the virtual objects in lockstep with the physical ones (at least at speeds where motion blur isn't a significant issue; you can fake that by minimizing motion blur in the real image by using a short shutter time on the cameras).

      • Exactly. Make everything blurry enough, and it all looks fake. Or real. Or whatever. How did this make it out of the firehose? (Oh, right, too many people don't actually READ the summary in the firehose, never mind the actual article(s). Just the headline ).

    • Re:Duh! (Score:5, Insightful)

      by julesh ( 229690 ) on Friday October 03, 2014 @03:15AM (#48054023)

      It isn't terribly surprising that adding a cartoonish rendering effect to both real and virtual objects would make them more difficult to discern as such. I certainly wouldn't call it more immersive - quite the opposite, in fact. It is extremely obvious that what you are looking at has been altered and that you are not looking at "reality".

      Right, but "immersive" doesn't mean "difficult to distinguish from reality" but rather "easy to treat as if it were real". I mean, I used to find playing Elite on my Sinclair Spectrum "immersive", but there's not a chance I'd ever fail to know it wasn't real. Being immersive means allowing people to retain what's often called "willing suspension of disbelief" [wikipedia.org] -- as long as the system I'm looking at behaves consistently, I can treat it as if it were real, so I can (at least sort-of) believe in its existence as a real thing. And maintaining that sense of existence is what people mean when they say immersion.

      The filters they applied in the video make the scenes look less realistic overall, but they make them more consistent, and that lets me believe in them as real in a way I can't easily believe in the unfiltered scene.

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by nman64 ( 912054 )

        Judging by the article, it doesn't seem like the experiment supports the conclusion. The experiment demonstrates that applying the filters makes it more difficult to distinguish real objects from virtual objects, but it does not necessarily follow that this makes the experience more immersive than the unfiltered version. In general, a consistent experience is important to suspension of disbelief, but that is only one factor. Most people didn't have a problem "getting into" "Who Framed Roger Rabbit?" or "Spa

    • Cartoon movies have shown us a world doesn't need to be photorealistic to be immersive. Worlds that stay away from the uncanny valley by being obvious cartoons do better than worlds that try to be, but aren't quite photorealistic.

    • It isn't terribly surprising that adding a cartoonish rendering effect to both real and virtual objects would make them more difficult to discern as such. I certainly wouldn't call it more immersive - quite the opposite, in fact. It is extremely obvious that what you are looking at has been altered and that you are not looking at "reality".

      immersive != realistic

      Basically, by making the real world less realistic you can increase the immersiveness of the experience.
      You obviously know that it's not real just like you know that a movie is not real but you still get a more immersive feel.
      I think the real takeaway from this isn't that it's harder to tell real from virtual when you make the real look virtual (duh!) but
      rather that a seemless less realistic cartoon environment feels more immersive than a realistic environment with virtual items
      added.

  • "The more you distort things, the less you can tell them from fakes." Surprise surprise surpriiiise!

    • I bet if we distorted the image so far that everything is just a black screen then people would drop to 0% accuracy in determining the fake objects! Wow, it's so awesome! [sarcasm tag here]

    • Re: (Score:1)

      by Tablizer ( 95088 )

      By the way, that's heavily paraphrased. I forgot to mention it.

  • This made me think immediately of the Borderlands games, which uses a black outline shader. Lots of PC gamers turn off the black lines (which are separate from the cell shading, by the way) but I left them on because I liked them, for reasons I couldn't ever explain very well.

  • "Boffins have found that when you alter the appearance of an object, humans find it more difficult to perceive it as it actually is".

  • Mind Blowing! ;) (Score:3)

    by ihaveamo ( 989662 ) on Friday October 03, 2014 @02:59AM (#48053973)
    Not even the article author knows what's real any more! Quote from TFA: For example, users avoided simulated boxes in one of the experiments when walking around despite knowing that they were real.

  • I stepped outside once (Score:5, Funny)

    by ihtoit ( 3393327 ) on Friday October 03, 2014 @03:01AM (#48053985)

    It reminded me that I needed to upgrade my video card.

    "Dude, the colour depth out there is fucking *amazing*!"

    • Re: (Score:3)

      by ihtoit ( 3393327 )

      the NPCs and gameplay suck though.

      (OLD meme, even older than memebase or cheezburger or whatever, it probably predates 7th Guest!)

  • I couldn't figure out what this part of the summary meant:

    accuracy dropped to 56% (around change)

    Then I watched the video in the article, where they actually say:

    Participants demonstrated 56% accuracy (around chance)

    i.e.: 56% is pretty close to the 50% you'd expect from just guessing. That one letter makes a big difference.

  • Stylised rendering might make it harder to detect the difference between real and virtual objects but clearly at the (great) expense of realism. What seems very obvious to me is the difference in latency between updating the scene for a real object and updating the scene for a virtual object. The virtual objects seem to be catching up with the real objects when the subject pans their view. That 'lag' combined with our natural sensitivity to motion is the problem.
  • TFA didn't make it harder to identify virtual objects as TFS implies - It made real objects look more like virtual ones.

    Aka, "if we make everything look like cartoons, people can't tell which cartoons came from the real world".

  • Is that a fancy phrase for "out of focus"? "Low definition"? Why does this "scientific" study evoke a huge, resonating "DOH!" ??

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