Week 10 Summaires

Physiological Measures of Presence in Stressful Virtual Environments

The paper proposed a novel way to measure the presence a virtual environment evokes in users, which is measuring the physiological responses. In this paper, the researchers reported their evaluation of three physiological measures – heart rate, skin conductance and skin temperature. Based on the principle that the measure should be reliable, valid, sensitive and objective, they conduct three experiments to evaluate these physiological responses. The virtual environment of the experiments is a training room with the ability to elicit a fear reaction in users. Three physiological metrics that measure stress in real environment were evaluated in these experiments. Three experiments were conducted to investigate the influence factors of presence which are exposures, Passive Haptics and frame rates. Then the paper talks about the reliability, validity, sensitivity and objectivity of these three measures according the result of the experiments. And at last, the authors give the result of how these influence factors affect the present of a virtual environment.

 

The Uncanny Valley: Effect of Realism on the Impression of Artificial Human Face

The paper investigated the uncanny valley by measuring observers’ impressions of facial images. The realism of these facial images was manipulated by morphing between artificial and real human faces. The study was conducted by several web-based experiments. Each participant was given a stimulus image sequence of different artificial face. For each image, participants need to report their feelings by clicking one of the five buttons which corresponding to 5-scale pleasantness scores from unpleasant to pleasant. The first experiment was to test the prediction that the uncanny valley would always emerge at some point when the degree of realism is increased approaching the most realistic level. Experiment 2 was used for testing whether the failure to detect the uncanny valley in experiment 1 was because the inappropriate range of realism in the stimuli. The experiment 3 tested how the effect of abnormal eye size affect the uncanny valley and experiment 4 was designed for investigating the possible influences of confounding. The result of these experiment showed that facial images with highly realistic often yielded unpleasant impression. And the uncanny valley was confirmed only when morphed faces had abnormal features.

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