The role of mismatches in the sensory feedback provided to indicate selection within a virtual environment

It is generally understood that virtual reality simulations have a high computational cost. Hence, they rarely can reduce completely all the incoherence within the cross-modal sensory outputs provided. The main research approaches to date have consisted in technically reducing possible mismatches, however minimal research has been conducted so as to analyse their influence on human capabilities. Thus, the objective of this study is to provide further insights to the designers of virtual reality about the negative influence of simulation lags and interesting design implications. To clearly show this, we have investigated the importance of coherent sensory feedback by incorporating time delays and spatial misalignments in the feedback provided by the simulation as a response to participant′s actions to mimic computationally expensive environments. We have also evaluated these misalignments considering two typical interaction setups. In particular, the sensory mismatches influence has been assessed in human factors, such as the sense of presence, task performance and delay perception. Our experimental results indicate that the closer the interaction conditions are to real configurations the higher the sensory requirements are regarding accuracy. The implications of this study offer the designer guidelines to prioritise the reduction of those mismatches in the sensory cues provided depending on the simulations goals.