Universitat Politécnica de Catalunya: The Ground Truth Approach – stepwise from real to virtual experience

A novel approach for the experimental designs, and for the evaluation itself, will be the Ground Truth approach. The idea is let volunteers to perform the same task or experiment, in gradual different configurations from the completely real one to the completely virtual. The Universitat Politécnica de Catalunya is planning to conduct some of the studies in the three project scenarios using this strategy. In itself the idea of comparing real and virtual situation is not new, but the interesting step forward in this approach is setting up different configurations in between. The real data are the basis from where to start in the comparison and then a gradual introduction of virtual streams can provide information about the different components and factors in the experimental setup. The starting point could be the real situation, for instance the exploration of an object by hand. Volunteers would be asked to monitor the experience in a specific questionnaire. Then the level of fidelity and reality will be changed, starting from the ground truth (GT), performing GT-1 and GT-2 … and so on, until a condition completely virtual is reached. In the IMMERSENCE scenarios this could start from the replacement of the direct view on the real object with a stereoscopic video see-through display, followed by the stepwise introduction of visuo-haptic displays, then by visual feedback with a synthesised video sequence, and finally by the synthesis of visual and haptic feedback. This strategy may give some information about critical configuration of eventually highly simplified cues, which still allow a high level of presence in an economically feasible system.

Related deliverables: Review of experimental studies to measure presence.

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