Saracini, C. 1 , Bluemel, E. 2 & Olivetti Belardinelli, M. 1, 3
1 Interuniversity Centre for Research on Cognitive Processing in Natural and Artificial Systems (ECONA), Rome, Italy
2 Fraunhofer Institute for Factory Operation and Automation IFF, Magdeburg, Germany
3 Department of Psychology, Sapienza University of Rome, Italy
Few work has been done to verify if the use of stereoscopy in a Virtual Environment simulate well, or well enough, the human vision’s processes and if it allows a satisfactory mental spatial representation of the surrounding space, with reference to reciprocal distances between objects and depth perception. In our study, we tested a distances estimates task on the same huge screen (Engineers Workstation), with and without stereoscopy. The results showed that a) the presence of stereoscopy didn’t help in having a precise estimate of metric ego and allocentric distances of objects, but b) if the modality of the answer changes from metric to non-metric, the tendency is to respond more correctly in the stereoscopy condition; c) women do worse than men, especially within the stereoscopy condition; d) independently from the modality of the estimates, women perform better without stereoscopy, while men get better results with it. This allow us to claim that there is a difference between the artificial stereoscopy in VR and the natural binocular disparity, as it’s known from literature that monocular view reduce dramatically the human ability for distances estimates in real environments. These results are therefore discussed in terms of gender differences and cognitive styles.