PIVE 2012 - 2012 IEEE VR Workshop on Perceptual Illusions in Virtual Environments (PIVE)

Virtual environments (VEs) provide humans with synthetic worlds in which they can interact with their virtual surrounding. However, while interacting in a VE system, humans are still located in the physical setup: they move through a laboratory space or may touch real-world objects. This duality of being in the real world while receiving visual, haptic, or aural information from the virtual world places users in a unique situation, forcing them to integrate (or separate) stimuli from potentially different sources simultaneously. The fact that a person's perception of a virtual reality environment can vary enormously from the perception of real world environments opens up a broad field of potential applications that take advantage of perceptual illusions. Such illusions arise from misinterpretation by the brain of sensory information:

Visual illusions exploit the fact that vision usually dominates proprioceptive and vestibular senses. Based on this, redirected walking can force users to be guided on physical paths, which may vary from the paths on which they perceive they are walking in the virtual world.
Haptic illusions may give users the impression of feeling virtual objects by touching real world props. The physical objects that represent and provide passive haptic feedback for the virtual objects may vary in size, weight, or surface from the virtual counterparts without users observing the discrepancy.
Acoustic illusions may result in users perceive (self-) motion (such as vection) when no such visual motion is being supplied.
The objective of the PIVE workshop is to foster discussions among participants and to provide an intensive exchange between industrial and academic researchers. The workshop will provide a venue for understanding perceptual thresholds in VEs and will facilitate exploratory discussion for how the related perceptual deviations can be further increased or where these concepts can be successfully applied.