Peripersonal Space: An Index of Multisensory Body–Environment Interactions in Real, Virtual, and Mixed Realities

作者：Andrea Serino, Jean‐Paul Noel, Robin Mange, Elisa Canzoneri, Elisa Pellencin, Javier Bello Ruiz, Fosco Bernasconi, Olaf Blanke, Bruno Herbelin · 发表于：Frontiers in ICT · 年份：2018 · DOI：10.3389/fict.2017.00031 · 被引用次数：77 · 研究领域：Virtual Reality Applications and Impacts、Multisensory perception and integration、Tactile and Sensory Interactions

Human-environment interactions normally occur in the physical milieu, and thus by medium of the body and within the space immediately adjacent to and surrounding the body; the peri-personal space (PPS). However, human interactions increasingly occur with or within virtual environments, and hence novel approaches and metrics must be developed to index human-environment interactions in virtual reality (VR). Here we present a multisensory task that measures the spatial extent of human PPS in real, virtual, and augmented realities. We validated it in a mixed reality ecosystem in which real environment and virtual objects are blended together in order to administer and control visual, auditory, and tactile stimuli in ecologically valid conditions. Within this mixed-reality environment, participants are asked to respond as fast as possible to tactile stimuli on their body, while task-irrelevant visual or audio-visual stimuli approach their body. Results demonstrate that, in analogy with observations derived from monkey electrophysiology and in real environmental surroundings, tactile detection is enhanced when visual or auditory stimuli are close to the body, and not when far from it. We then calculate the location where this multisensory facilitation occurs as a proxy of the boundary of PPS. We observe that mapping of PPS via audio-visual, as opposed to visual alone, looming stimuli results in sigmoidal fits – allowing for the bifurcation between near and far space – with greater ...