REAL OR RENDERED? DETERMINING HUMAN PREFERENCES IN AN EXTENDED REALITY ENVIRONMENT

Abstract

The Army and the Department of Defense (DoD) have a desire to bring extended reality (XR) technologies into both the training and operational environments. Augmented reality (AR) technology has moved to the forefront of this effort. This study had two goals. The first was to determine if humans have an instinctual preference in reacting to real or rendered objects while operating in an XR environment. The second was to determine whether military members have been conditioned, through training, to look or move to the left first. We hypothesized that humans would favor real objects over rendered objects, and military members would attend to their left side first. To investigate this, we developed an experiment in which the participants were given a search task in XR. Only two objects were placed in the room, a real and rendered cardboard box. The object preference was found to be significant, but not in the manner we had hypothesized. Overall, our results suggest that our participants tended to look left first (65% of the participants) and chose to interact with the rendered object first (87% of the participants). These findings indicate that further research is necessary to investigate the ecological implications of XR environments and human activities in them.