Jonathan W Kelly

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Verified

Jonathan verified their affiliation via an institutional email.

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• Ph.D.
• Professor (Full) at Iowa State University

Accurate wayfinding is essential to the survival of many animal species and requires the ability to maintain spatial orientation during locomotion. One of the ways that humans and other animals stay spatially oriented is through path integration, which operates by integrating self-motion cues over time, providing information about total displacemen...

Underperception of egocentric distance in virtual reality has been a persistent concern for almost 20 years. Modern head-mounted displays (HMDs) appear to have begun to ameliorate underperception. The current study examined several aspects of perceived space in the HTC Vive. Blind-walking distance judgments, verbal distance judgments, and size judg...

Navigation is influenced by body-based self-motion cues that are integrated over time, in a process known as path integration, as well as by environmental cues such as landmarks and room shape. In two experiments we explored whether humans combine path integration and environmental cues (Exp. 1: room shape; Exp. 2: room shape, single landmark, and...

Teleporting is a popular interface to allow virtual reality users to explore environments that are larger than the available walking space. When teleporting, the user positions a marker in the virtual environment and is instantly transported without any self-motion cues. Five experiments were designed to evaluate the spatial cognitive consequences...

General Audience Summary Turn-by-turn guidance is a common tool used to navigate a new route. But compared to active exploration, route guidance leads to worse memory for the environment. Past research has demonstrated this through tasks such as map drawing and scene recognition, which are worse after following route guidance. Whether route retraci...

Cybersickness, or sickness caused by virtual reality (VR), represents a significant threat to the usability of VR applications. Repeated exposure to the same VR stimulus causes a reduction in cybersickness, referred to as Cybersickness Abatement from Repeated Exposure (CARE). This study examined whether the benefits of CARE generalize across distin...

This study explored the effects of scene complexity factor on cybersickness. In this between-subjects experiment, 44 participants played the Pendulum Chair VR game, half with a simple scene and half with a complex scene. The complex scene featured higher optic flow (lower-level perceptual factor) and higher familiarity (higher level factor). Depend...

Cybersickness, or sickness induced by virtual reality (VR), negatively impacts the enjoyment and adoption of the technology. One method that has been used to reduce sickness is repeated exposure to VR, herein Cybersickness Abatement from Repeated Exposure (CARE). However, high sickness levels during repeated exposure may discourage some users from...

Multiple tools are available to reduce cybersickness (sickness caused by virtual reality), but past research has not investigated the combined effects of multiple mitigation tools. Field of view (FOV) restriction limits peripheral vision during self-motion, and ample evidence supports its effectiveness for reducing cybersickness. Snap turning invol...

Cybersickness, or sickness induced by virtual reality (VR), negatively impacts the enjoyment and adoption of the technology. Cybersickness decreases across repeated VR exposure, known as adaptation. However, high sickness levels during adaptation may discourage some users from returning. Field of view (FOV) restriction reduces cybersickness by mini...

This investigation examined the relationships among scene complexity, workload, presence, and cybersickness in virtual reality (VR) environments. Numerous factors can influence the overall VR experience, and existing research on this matter is not yet conclusive, warranting further investigation. In this between subjects experimental setup, 44 part...

Cybersickness -- discomfort caused by virtual reality (VR) -- remains a significant problem that negatively affects the user experience. Research on individual differences in cybersickness has typically focused on overall sickness intensity, but a detailed understanding should include whether individuals differ in the relative intensity of cybersic...

Multiple tools are available to reduce cybersickness (sickness caused by virtual reality), but past research has not investigated the combined effects of multiple mitigation tools. Field of view (FOV) restriction limits peripheral vision during self-motion, and ample evidence supports its effectiveness for reducing cybersickness. Snap turning invol...

Widespread adoption of virtual reality (VR) will likely be limited by the common occurrence of cybersickness. Cybersickness susceptibility varies across individuals, and previous research reported that interpupillary distance (IPD) may be a factor. However, that work emphasized cybersickness recovery rather than cybersickness immediately after expo...

Cybersickness is a barrier to widespread adoption of virtual reality (VR). We summarize the literature and conclude that women experience more cybersickness than do men, but that the size of the gender effect is modest. We present a mediation and moderation framework for organizing existing research and proposing new questions about gender and cybe...

Cybersickness is a barrier to widespread adoption of virtual reality (VR). We summarize the literature and conclude that women experience more cybersickness than do men, but that the size of the gender effect is modest. We present a mediation and moderation framework for organizing existing research and proposing new questions about gender and cybe...

Widespread adoption of virtual reality (VR) will likely be limited by the common occurrence of cybersickness. Cybersickness susceptibility varies across individuals, and previous research reported that interpupillary distance (IPD) may be a factor. However, that work emphasized cybersickness recovery rather than cybersickness immediately after expo...

Virtual environments (VEs) can be infinitely large, but movement of the virtual reality (VR) user is constrained by the surrounding real environment. Teleporting has become a popular locomotion interface to allow complete exploration of the VE. To teleport, the user selects the intended position (and sometimes orientation) before being instantly tr...

Distances are commonly underperceived in virtual reality (VR), and this finding has been documented repeatedly over more than two decades of research. Yet, there is evidence that perceived distance is more accurate in modern compared to older head-mounted displays (HMDs). This meta-analysis of 131 studies describes egocentric distance perception ac...

This study explored the impact of task workload on virtual reality (VR) cybersickness. Cybersickness is a negative side effect of using VR to which many users are susceptible. Previous research on the impact on task workload on cybersickness has yielded no consistent relationships, but given that task workload requires attentional resources, it is...

Virtual environments (VEs) can be infinitely large, but movement of the virtual reality (VR) user is constrained by the surrounding real environment. Teleporting has become a popular locomotion interface to allow complete exploration of the VE. To teleport, the user selects the intended position (and sometimes orientation) before being instantly tr...

Virtual reality users are susceptible to disorientation, particularly when using locomotion interfaces that lack self-motion cues. Environmental cues, such as boundaries defined by walls or a fence, provide information to help the user remain oriented. This experiment evaluated whether the type of boundary impacts its usefulness for staying oriente...

Distances in virtual environments (VEs) viewed on a head-mounted display (HMD) are typically underperceived relative to the intended distance. This paper presents an experiment comparing perceived egocentric distance in a real environment with that in a matched VE presented in the Oculus Quest and Oculus Quest 2. Participants made verbal judgments...

Virtual reality users are susceptible to disorientation, particularly when using locomotion interfaces that lack self-motion cues. Environmental cues, such as boundaries defined by walls or a fence, provide information to help the user remain oriented. This experiment evaluated whether the type of boundary impacts its usefulness for staying oriente...

The wide availability of consumer-oriented virtual reality (VR) equipment has enabled researchers to recruit existing VR owners to participate remotely using their own equipment. Yet, there are many differences between lab environments and home environments, as well as differences between participant samples recruited for lab studies and remote stu...

Distances are commonly underperceived in virtual reality (VR), and this finding has been documented repeatedly over more than two decades of research. Yet, there is evidence that perceived distance is more accurate in modern compared to older head-mounted displays (HMDs). This meta-analysis of 123 studies describes egocentric distance perception ac...

Distances in virtual environments (VEs) viewed on a head-mounted display (HMD) are typically underperceived relative to the intended distance. This paper presents an experiment comparing perceived egocentric distance in a real environment with that in a matched VE presented in the Oculus Quest and Oculus Quest 2. Participants made verbal judgments...

Virtual reality (VR) allows users to walk to explore the virtual environment (VE), but this capability is constrained by real obstacles. Teleporting interfaces overcome this constraint by allowing users to select a position, and sometimes orientation, in the VE before being instantly transported without self-motion cues. This study investigated whe...

The wide availability of consumer-oriented virtual reality (VR) equipment has enabled researchers to recruit existing VR owners to participate remotely using their own equipment. Yet, there are many differences between lab environments and home environments, as well as differences between participant samples recruited for lab studies and remote stu...

There are several barriers to research translation from academia to the broader HCI/UX community and specifically for the design of virtual reality applications. Because of the inaccessibility of evidence-based VR research to industry practitioners, freely-available blog-style media on platforms like Medium, where there is no moderation, is more av...

Characteristics of a virtual reality user are known to affect cybersickness, but the specific role of individual differences, such as personality, is largely unknown. This study addressed this gap through examination of subjective recall survey data relating to experiences in virtual reality, including severity of cybersickness symptoms, cybersickn...

Characteristics of a virtual reality user are known to affect cybersickness, but the specific role of individual differences, such as personality, is largely unknown. This study addressed this gap through examination of subjective recall survey data relating to experiences in virtual reality, including severity of cybersickness symptoms, cybersickn...

Turn-by-turn GPS guidance is useful when the navigator is uncertain about the correct route. Although route guidance is convenient, it comes at a spatial cognitive cost. Compared to unguided navigation, route guidance leads to poorer knowledge of the traversed environment. However, past research has not tested the effects of route guidance on route...

The proliferation of locomotion interfaces for virtual reality necessitates a framework for predicting and evaluating navigational success. Spatial updating---the process of mentally updating one's self-location during locomotion---is a core component of navigation, is easy to measure, and is sensitive to common elements of locomotion interfaces. T...

The proliferation of locomotion interfaces for virtual reality necessitates a framework for predicting and evaluating navigational success. Spatial updating—the process of mentally updating one’s self-location during locomotion—is a core component of navigation, is easy to measure, and is sensitive to common elements of locomotion interfaces. This...

The number of people who own a virtual reality (VR) head-mounted display (HMD) has reached a point where researchers can readily recruit HMD owners to participate remotely using their own equipment. However, HMD owners recruited online may differ from the university community members who typically participate in VR research. HMD owners (n=220) and...

The number of people who own a virtual reality (VR) head-mounted display (HMD) has reached a point where researchers can readily recruit HMD owners to participate remotely using their own equipment. However, HMD owners recruited online may differ from the university community members who typically participate in VR research. HMD owners (n=220) and...

Research about vection (illusory self-motion) has investigated a wide range of sensory cues and employed various methods and equipment, including use of virtual reality (VR). However, there is currently no research in the field of vection on the impact of floating in water while experiencing VR. Aquatic immersion presents a new and interesting meth...

Virtual reality (VR) allows users to walk to explore the virtual environment (VE), but this capability is constrained by real obstacles. Teleporting interfaces overcome this constraint by allowing users to select a position, and sometimes orientation, in the VE before being instantly transported without self-motion cues. This study investigated whe...

Teleporting interfaces are widely used in virtual reality applications to explore large virtual environments. When teleporting, the user indicates the intended location in the virtual environment and is instantly transported, typically without self-motion cues. This project explored the cost of teleporting on the acquisition of survey knowledge (i....

Teleportation in virtual reality (VR) affords the ability to explore beyond the physical space. Previous work has demonstrated that this interface comes at a spatial cognitive cost – though, upon closer inspection, not everyone appears similarly affected. A latent profile analysis identified three groups that significantly differed on spatial updating...

Virtual reality systems typically allow users to physically walk and turn, but virtual environments (VEs) often exceed the available walking space. Teleporting has become a common user interface, whereby the user aims a laser pointer to indicate the desired location, and sometimes orientation, in the VE before being transported without self-motion...

Teleporting is a popular interface to allow virtual reality users to explore environments that are larger than the available walking space. When teleporting, the user positions a marker in the virtual environment and is instantly transported without any self-motion cues. Five experiments were designed to evaluate the spatial cognitive consequences...

Vision in real environments stabilizes balance compared to an eyes-closed condition. For virtual reality to be safe and fully effective in applications such as physical rehabilitation, vision in virtual reality should stabilize balance as much as vision in the real world. Older virtual reality technology was previously found to stabilize balance bu...

The accuracy of machine learning tasks critically depends on high quality ground truth data. Therefore, in many cases, producing good ground truth data typically involves trained professionals; however, this can be costly in time, effort, and money. Here we explore the use of crowdsourcing to generate a large number of training data of good quality...

Instructions given to participants. (PDF)

Example of easy and hard images. Examples of easy and hard images. In general, hard images have many tassels in the background and overlaps between tassels in the foreground, while easy images have very clear tassels in the foreground. (PDF)

Outliers in time consumption. Outliers in time spent per question, for example 15,484 seconds, were effectively smoothed by log transformation, as shown by the histograms. (PDF)

Statistical analysis on the fatigue effect. Parameter estimates in linear mixed effects regression of accuracy over time. (PDF)

Spatial memories are often hierarchically organized with different regions of space represented in unique clusters within the hierarchy. Each cluster is thought to be organized around its own microreference frame selected during learning, whereas relationships between clusters are organized by a macroreference frame. Two experiments were conducted...

The accuracy of machine learning tasks critically depends on high quality ground truth data. Therefore, in many cases, producing good ground truth data typically involves trained professionals; however, this can be costly in time, effort, and money. Here we explore the use of crowdsourcing to generate a large number of training data of good quality...

Distance is commonly underperceived in virtual environments (VEs) compared to real environments. Past work suggests that displaying a replica VE based on the real surrounding environment leads to more accurate judgments of distance, but that work has lacked the necessary control conditions to firmly make this conclusion. Other research indicates th...

The presence of another person in a spatial scene has been shown to induce spontaneous perspective taking. This investigation presents two experiments exploring whether the presence of another person affects reference frame selection when representing object locations in memory. Participants studied objects from one view and later performed judgmen...

The current study investigated the ways in which environmental and idiothetic cues affect the nature of the reference frame (i.e., egocentric or allocentric) in path integration in a virtual environment. Participants navigated to multiple waypoints and then attempted to walk or point to the first waypoint. We manipulated the environmental geometry,...

Research over the past 20 years has consistently shown that egocentric distance is underperceived in virtual environments (VEs) compared with real environments. In 2 experiments, judgments of object distance (Experiment 1) and object size (Experiment 2) improved after a brief period of walking through the VE with continuous visual feedback. Whereas...

The current study investigated the reference frame used in spatial updating when idiothetic cues to self-motion were minimized (desktop virtual reality). In Experiment 1, participants learned a layout of eight objects from a single perspective (learning heading) in a virtual environment. After learning, they were placed in the same virtual environm...

This project investigated the ways in which visual cues and bodily cues from self-motion are combined in spatial navigation. Participants completed a homing task in an immersive virtual environment. In Experiments 1A and 1B, the reliability of visual cues and self-motion cues was manipulated independently and within-participants. Results showed tha...

Distances tend to be underperceived in virtual environments (VEs) by up to 50%, whereas distances tend to be perceived accurately in the real world. Previous work has shown that allowing participants to interact with the VE while receiving continual visual feedback can reduce this underperception. Judgments of virtual object size have been used to...

Three experiments investigated whether spatial information acquired from vision and language is maintained in distinct spatial representations on the basis of the input modality. Participants studied a visual and a verbal layout of objects at different times from either the same (Experiments 1 and 2) or different learning perspectives (Experiment 3...

Virtual reality has grown rapidly over the past decade, yet visually induced motion sickness (VIMS), continues to affect the usability of this technology. Aside from medicine, physical hand-eye-coordination tasks have been found to be effective in mitigating symptoms of VIMS, however the need for equipment outside of virtual reality limits the usef...

Distance is commonly underperceived by up to 50 % in virtual environments (VEs), in contrast to relatively accurate real world judgments. Experiments reported by Geuss, Stefanucci, Creem-Regehr, and Thompson (Journal of Experimental Psychology: Human Perception and Performance, 38, 1242-1253, 2012) indicate that the exocentric distance separating t...

Studies of the testing effect have shown that retrieval significantly improves learning. However, most of these studies have been restricted to simple types of declarative verbal knowledge. Five experiments were designed to explore whether testing improves acquisition of route knowledge, which has a procedural component consisting of actions to be...

Many interfaces exist for locomotion in virtual reality, although they are rarely considered fully natural. Past research has found that using such interfaces places cognitive demands on the user, with unnatural actions and concurrent tasks competing for finite cognitive resources. Notably, using semi-natural interfaces leads to poor performance on...

Distance in immersive virtual reality is commonly underperceived relative to intended distance, causing virtual environments to appear smaller than they actually are. However, a brief period of interaction by walking through the virtual environment with visual feedback can cause dramatic improvement in perceived distance. The goal of the current pr...

Collaborative inhibition refers to the finding that pairs of people working together to retrieve information from memory-a collaborative group-often retrieve fewer unique items than do nominal pairs, who retrieve individually but whose performance is pooled. Two experiments were designed to explore whether collaborative inhibition, which has hereto...

Selection of moving targets is a common, yet complex task in human-computer interaction (HCI) and virtual reality (VR). Predicting user intention may be beneficial to address the challenges inherent in interaction techniques for moving-target selection. This article extends previous models by integrating relative head-target and hand-target feature...

Two experiments investigated whether separate sets of objects viewed in the same environment but from different views were encoded as a single integrated representation or maintained as distinct representations. Participants viewed two circular layouts of objects that were placed around them in a round (Experiment 1) or a square (Experiment 2) room...

In three experiments, we investigated whether the information available to visual perception prior to encoding the locations of objects in a path through proprioception would influence the reference direction from which the spatial memory was formed. Participants walked a path whose orientation was misaligned to the walls of the enclosing room and...

Virtual reality systems commonly include both monocular and binocular depth cues, which have the potential to provide viewers with a realistic impression of spatial properties of the virtual environment. However, when multiple viewers share the same display, only one viewer typically receives the projectively correct images. All other viewers exper...

Abstract There is currently no fully natural, general-purpose locomotion interface. Instead, interfaces such as gamepads or treadmills are required to explore large virtual environments (VEs). Furthermore, sensory feedback that would normally be used in real-world movement is often restricted in VR due to constraints such as reduced field of view (...

Novel interaction techniques have been developed to address the difficulties of selecting moving targets. However, similar to their static-target counterparts, these techniques may suffer from clutter and overlap, which can be addressed by predicting intended targets. Unfortunately, current predictive techniques are tailored towards static-target s...

Egocentric distances in virtual environments are commonly underperceived by up to 50 % of the intended distance. However, a brief period of interaction in which participants walk through the virtual environment while receiving visual feedback can dramatically improve distance judgments. Two experiments were designed to explore whether the increase...

The current study examined the potential influence of existing spatial knowledge on the coding of new spatial information. In the Main experiment, participants learned the locations of five objects before completing a perspective-taking task. Subsequently, they studied the same five objects and five additional objects from a new location before com...

People often carry out tasks that entail coordinating spatial information encoded in temporally and/or spatially distinct perceptual experiences. Much research has been conducted to determine whether such spatial information is integrated into a single spatial representation or whether it is kept in separate representations that can be related at t...

In this paper, we describe an experiment designed to evaluate the effectiveness of three interfaces for surveillance or remote control using live 360-degree video feeds from a person or vehicle in the field. Video feeds are simulated using a game engine. While locating targets within a 3D terrain using a 2D 360-degree interface, participants indica...

Stereoscopic depth cues improve depth perception and increase immersion within virtual environments (VEs). However, improper display of these cues can distort perceived distances and directions. Consider a multi-user VE, where all users view identical stereoscopic images regardless of physical location. In this scenario, cues are typically customiz...

This study incorporated a dual-task paradigm, in which participants were asked to perform basic locomotion tasks with one of three interfaces while remembering a sequence of either spatial or verbal items. Interfaces varied in similarity to natural body movements. Stopping performance was compromised when concurrently remembering a spatial, but not...

Many studies have reported that tests are beneficial for learning (e.g., Roediger & Karpicke, 2006a). However, the majority of studies on the testing effect have been limited to a combination of relatively simple verbal tasks and final tests that assessed memory for the same material that had originally been tested. The present study explored wheth...

In this paper we describe a novel approach for comparing users' spatial cognition when using different depictions of 360- degree video on a traditional 2D display. By using virtual cameras within a game engine and texture mapping of these camera feeds to an arbitrary shape, we were able to offer users a 360-degree interface composed of four 90-degr...