“Simulating spatial assumptions” by Mania and Robinson

This sketch presents a new method for assessing ‘functional realism’ across a range of applications. The basic premise is that an individual’s prior experience will influence how he or she perceives, comprehends and remembers new information in a scene. 36 participants across three conditions of varied rendering quality of the same space were exposed to the computer graphics environment and completed an object-based memory recognition task. The preliminary experiments presented here could have significant implications while identifying areas of an interactive computer graphics scene that require higher quality of rendering as well as areas where lower fidelity could be adequate, based on this premise.

1. BREWER, W. F. & TREYENS, J. C. (1981). Role of Schemata in Memory for Places. Cognitive Psychology, 13, 207–230.
2. MANIA, K., TROSCIANKO, T., HAWKES, R., CHALMERS, A. (2003). Fidelity Metrics for VE Simulations based on Spatial Memory Awareness States. Presence, Teleoperators and Virtual Environments, 12(3), MIT Press.