The Use of Shadows on Real Floor as a Depth Correction of Stereoscopically Visualized Virtual Objects

This article describes our initial experimental results more about how shadow cues on real space impact an individual´s ability to perceive the depth of objects in a 3D stereoscopic environment. During the course of developing direct touch interaction systems, we found that it was consistently difficult to control depth perception. We observed that users often had problems identifying the 3D location of virtual objects in binocular stereo vision, resulting in failure to touch the virtual object. To address this limitation, we developed and explored a technique to generate shadows in real space. The shadows of virtual objects were artificially generated and projected onto the floor of real space corresponding to the 3D locations of virtual objects. This setting was tested to evaluate whether these shadows improved an individual´s ability to perceive the depth of virtual objects. The effectiveness of the proposed method is herein discussed with the results.