Reaching Between Worlds: Calibration and Transfer of Perceived Affordances from Virtual to Real Environments

Accurate perception of one’s action capabilities, or affordance perception, is essential for successful interaction with both real and virtual environments. Affordance perception can potentially be improved by receiving feedback. It is unknown what specific types of feedback are needed for improvements in affordance perception to occur, particularly in virtual environments where cues may be impoverished. The current work studied perception of horizontal reachability in virtual and augmented reality (VR and AR), specifically whether it would improve with feedback, and if any improvement transferred to the real world. Multiple types of feedback were studied in VR or AR: exploratory behavior, static outcome, and action outcome feedback. Our results indicate that exploratory behavior is sufficient for improvement in perceived reachability in VR, but in AR, outcome feedback is necessary. In both VR and AR, outcome feedback was required for improvement in perceived reachability to transfer to the real world. These findings have practical implications for training in virtual environments. If virtual environments are used for training actions that ultimately need to be performed in the real world, outcome feedback should be provided.