Effects of handling real objects and avatar fidelity on cognitive task performance in virtual environments

Immersive virtual environments (VEs) provide participants with computer-generated environments filled with virtual objects to assist in learning, training, and practicing dangerous and/or expensive tasks. But for certain tasks, does having every object being virtual inhibit the interactivity? Further, does the virtual object´s visual fidelity affect performance? Overall VE effectiveness may be reduced if users spend most of their time and cognitive capacity learning how to interact and adapting to interacting with a purely virtual environment. We investigated how handling real objects and how self-avatar visual fidelity affects performance on a spatial cognitive task in an immersive VE. We compared participants´ performance on a block arrangement task in both a real-space environment and several virtual and hybrid environments. The results showed that manipulating real objects in a VE brings task performance closer to that of real space, compared to manipulating virtual objects.