Friction and slant perception in real and virtual environments

Comparisons between real-world spatial judgments and simulation equivalents provide performance benchmarks as well as tools to assess whether a technological set-up would be of similar functional fidelity to a real-world task situation. It is widely recognised that perceptual fidelity is not necessarily equivalent to physical simulation. Identifying ways to ‘induce’ reality by possibly distorting physics based on fundamental perceptual processes triggered in real and synthetic worlds rather than simulating the physics of reality is a novel research route worth pursuing. We describe a set of comparative studies between a real-world task situation and varied synthetic simulations which attempt to introduce novel functional fidelity metrics based on slant and friction perception, as well as novel perceptual estimates of slant offering a truly interdisciplinary approach.