Congruence Across the Reality-Virtuality Continuum

Open Human-Computer Interaction Bachelor Master Project Thesis Internship No Affiliation

Motivation:

Extended Reality (XR), including Virtual Reality (VR), Augmented Reality (AR), and Mixed Reality (MR), increasingly spans the full Reality-Virtuality continuum (Milgram & Kishino, 1994; Milgram et al., 1995) rather than remaining limited to isolated applications. Contemporary XR hardware include hybrid systems that combine immersive virtual environments with video see-through (VST) capabilities. It is therefore scientifically and practically important to better understand how users experience XR across different levels of technological mediation (Latoschik and Wienrich, 2022; Westermeier et al., 2023).

Goal:

The goal is to design and conduct a focused empirical study that investigates selected aspects of XR experience across reality conditions (VR, AR, but also physical reality if feasible). Depending on the specific topic, the study may address sensory, perceptual, or cognitive manipulations, for example:

• visual fidelity or altered timing of sensory information,
• spatial or perceptual distortions,
• cue conflicts or perceptual incongruence,
• semantic or cognitive conflicts during interaction.

Tasks:

• Familiarize yourself with relevant literature on XR theories about presence and plausibility and the taxonomies and developments about the RV continuum.
• Develop a focused research question and suitable hypotheses.
• Design and implement a controlled experimental setup.
• Conduct a user study using subjective and (ideally) objective measures.
• Analyze and interpret the collected data.
• Document the results.

The scope is adaptable depending on thesis/project type.

Prerequisits:

• Interest in VR, AR, perception, and empirical HCI research.
• Basic knowledge of experimental design and data analysis.
• Programming experience, preferably with Unity/C#.
• Experience with XR hardware (e.g. Meta Quest 3) is helpful, but not required.

Literature

Azuma, R. T. (1997). A Survey of Augmented Reality. Presence: Teleoperators and Virtual Environments, 6(4), 355–385. https://doi.org/10.1162/pres.1997.6.4.355

Latoschik, M. E., & Wienrich, C. (2022). Congruence and Plausibility, Not Presence: Pivotal Conditions for XR Experiences and Effects, a Novel Approach. Frontiers in Virtual Reality, 3. https://www.frontiersin.org/articles/10.3389/frvir.2022.694433

Milgram, P., & Kishino, F. (1994). A Taxonomy of Mixed Reality Visual Displays. IEICE Trans. Information Systems, E77-D, no. 12, 1321–1329.

Milgram, P., Takemura, H., Utsumi, A., & Kishino, F. (1995). Augmented reality: A class of displays on the reality-virtuality continuum (H. Das, Ed.; pp. 282–292). https://doi.org/10.1117/12.197321

Skarbez, R., Smith, M., & Whitton, M. C. (2021). Revisiting Milgram and Kishino’s Reality-Virtuality Continuum. Frontiers in Virtual Reality, 2, 27. https://doi.org/10.3389/frvir.2021.647997

Tran, T. Q., Langlotz, T., & Regenbrecht, H. (2024). A Survey On Measuring Presence in Mixed Reality. Proceedings of the CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems, CHI ‘24, 1–38. https://doi.org/10.1145/3613904.3642383

Westermeier, F., Brübach, L., Latoschik, M. E., & Wienrich, C. (2023). Exploring Plausibility and Presence in Mixed Reality Experiences. IEEE Transactions on Visualization and Computer Graphics, 29(5), 2680–2689. IEEE Transactions on Visualization and Computer Graphics. https://doi.org/10.1109/TVCG.2023.3247046

Westermeier, F., Brübach, L., Wienrich, C., & Latoschik, M. E. (2024). Assessing Depth Perception in VR and Video See-Through AR: A Comparison on Distance Judgment, Performance, and Preference. IEEE Transactions on Visualization and Computer Graphics, 30(5), 2140–2150. IEEE Transactions on Visualization and Computer Graphics. https://doi.org/10.1109/TVCG.2024.3372061

Contact Persons at the University Würzburg