Quantifying fidelity for virtual environment simulations employing memory schema assumptions

In a virtual environment (VE), efficient techniques are often needed to economize on rendering computation without compromising the information transmitted. The reported experiments devise a functional fidelity metric by exploiting research on memory schemata. According to the proposed measure, similar information would be transmitted across synthetic and real-world scenes depicting a specific schema. This would ultimately indicate which areas in a VE could be rendered in lower quality without affecting information uptake. We examine whether computationally more expensive scenes of greater visual fidelity affect memory performance after exposure to immersive VEs, or whether they are merely more aesthetically pleasing than their diminished visual quality counterparts. Results indicate that memory schemata function in VEs similar to real-world environments. “High-level” visual cognition related to late visual processing is unaffected by ubiquitous graphics manipulations such as polygon count and depth of shadow rendering; “normal” cognition operates as long as the scenes look acceptably realistic. However, when the overall realism of the scene is greatly reduced, such as in wireframe, then visual cognition becomes abnormal. Effects that distinguish schema-consistent from schema-inconsistent objects change because the whole scene now looks incongruent. We have shown that this effect is not due to a failure of basic recognition.