Attentional Orienting in Front and Rear Spaces in a Virtual Reality Discrimination Task.

Recent studies on covert attention suggested that the visual processing of information in front of us is different, depending on whether the information is present in front of us or if it is a reflection of information behind us (mirror information). This difference in processing suggests that we have different processes for directing our attention to objects in front of us (front space) or behind us (rear space). In this study, we investigated the effects of attentional orienting in front and rear space consecutive of visual or auditory endogenous cues. Twenty-one participants performed a modified version of the Posner paradigm in virtual reality during a spaceship discrimination task. An eye tracker integrated into the virtual reality headset was used to make sure that the participants did not move their eyes and used their covert attention. The results show that informative cues produced faster response times than non-informative cues but no impact on target identification was observed. In addition, we observed faster response times when the target occurred in front space rather than in rear space. These results are consistent with an orienting cognitive process differentiation in the front and rear spaces. Several explanations are discussed. No effect was found on subjects' eye movements, suggesting that participants did not use their overt attention to improve task performance.

Pushing open the door to reality: On facilitating the transitions from virtual to real environments.

The recent rise of virtual reality technology has led researchers to investigate how to adapt transitions to virtual environments. Transitions play a key role in facilitating the return to reality, which is of particular importance when the virtual world is far more agreeable than the real world. In the present study, the efficacy of a door transition - an almost "transparent" door falling out the top of the virtual environment and controlled by the user - was evaluated and compared to two basic transitions: a direct transition and a fading transition. Participants reported a strong preference for the door transition that was evaluated as being smoother, more controllable, and greatly facilitated the return to reality. Moreover, the results showed that the door transition triggered no greater sickness in participants than the two other types of transition.