Stylized rendering increases immersion (in virtual reality)

TheLizardbones

The article:

http://www.roadtovr.com/experiment-shows-stylized-rendering-can-enhance-presence-in-immersive-augmented-reality/

 

The synopsis:

People were asked to see if they could tell the difference between virtual items rendered into the real world via augmented reality.  Items that were rendered in a photorealistic manner had an error rate of 27% (27% of the time people could not pick out the virtual item).  Items rendered in a stylized manner had an error rate of 44% (44% of the time people could not pick out the virtual item).  The error rate jumped to 72% when a sketch like outline and cartoonish filters were applied.

 

For whatever reason, our brains are more easily fooled by stylized renderings than photorealistic renderings. 

 

Why is this relevant to gaming?  It seems like there is evidence that stylized rendering in video games increases our brain's acceptance of the virtual world as "real" or at least "acceptable" versus photorealistic rendering.

 

Anireth

For whatever reason? It's simply. If everything looks the same, it's hard to point out differences. It's extremely difficult to render something so photorealistic, that you do not notice a difference. So taking away realism across the board (maybe even more so for the actually real items?) is an easy way to fool us.

There may also be something like an uncanny valley effect for near-photorealism for regular objects, not only human-like appearences, as in, the little faults might stand out that much more to us the more the rest is fitting.

TheLizardbones

Originally posted by Anireth

For whatever reason? It's simply. If everything looks the same, it's hard to point out differences. It's extremely difficult to render something so photorealistic, that you do not notice a difference. So taking away realism across the board (maybe even more so for the actually real items?) is an easy way to fool us.

There may also be something like an uncanny valley effect for near-photorealism for regular objects, not only human-like appearences, as in, the little faults might stand out that much more to us the more the rest is fitting.

 

There is some doubt that the Uncanny Valley even exists.  The guy who came up with the term didn't do a very good study.  What does seem to be the case is that humans are really good at picking out small details that don't belong, and if there are fewer small details in general, our brains can't pick them out.  This is probably based on humans being able to see tigers sitting in the grass better than other animals.  Those little details meant living a bit longer.  If there are no little details that are "off", our brains relax and we can accept what we're seeing.

 

Vrika

Did you look at how carefully the test subjects had to walk when navigating through the boxes? That's immersive only if you think it would be immersive to be unable to function normally due to vision problems.

Arclan

DMKano that is some quantum text. Thanks. This helps explain why I felt perfectly at home in Everquest with the original blocky graphics, but felt put off by movies such as beowulf and Final Fantasy. By trying to be more real, they seemed less real to me.

But games like F.E.A.R., Half Life 2, Fallout: New Vegas seemed great. More modern games, like crysis, didn't pull me in.

Loktofeit

Originally posted by Anireth

For whatever reason? It's simply. If everything looks the same, it's hard to point out differences. It's extremely difficult to render something so photorealistic, that you do not notice a difference. So taking away realism across the board (maybe even more so for the actually real items?) is an easy way to fool us.

But we are talking about augmented reality, not virtual reality, in those tests. It is a real world environment with stylized objects added. One would think that the photorealistic would blend in better than objects with a seemingly obvious stark contrast. This is where the problem of Uncanny Valley comes in. The mind is trying to blend those photorealistic objects into the environment but it notices something is off about them, sometimes not able to discern exactly what. Your mind makes no such attempt, or at least far less of an attempt, when the object is stylized but makes logical sense as to its presence. 

Archlyte

Originally posted by DMKano

 

What AR Rift showed is that as additional stylized *filters* were added to previously photorealistic rendered objects our brains became more accepting of VR immersion.

Again they kept adding stylized filters over the oringal rendering - they didn't replace it with a doodle edge drawing which any person could pick out easily as fake.

Photorealistic rendering in VR looks very unnatural to us as we are so good at noticing imperfection of *reality* - so our brains are constantly comparing it to real world.

Once you stylize everything in VR, our brains accept it as different enough to accept as new baseline and the whole "this looks a bit off from reality" action in the brain stops, which is why it feels more immerisive - as with stylized VR our brains relax into "this is a new kind of world" experience.

Bottom line - VR too close to reality feels less immersive because our brains are constantly in the state of noticing imperfections which takes away from immersion

Stylized VR - more immersive as our brains accept it as different enough to be considered as a "new world" 

 

And none of it has anything to do with aesthetic opinion. If you had players that were only a visual cortex and limited cognition this would be a boon. But given the complexity of how Art is perceived, evaluated, and evokes an emotional response this amounts to having very little effect on the whole.

Good analysis by the way Kano. +1