Effect of Appearance on Perception of Deformation

Abstract

We provide an experimental validation that appearance of an object can influence the perception of its level of deformation in a 3D simulation. Our study provides helpful insights in how to improve visual plausibility of deformation, which may allow artists to adjust their designs to enhance or minimize the perceived deformation in a model. We use a physically-based deformation model to simulate simple geometric shapes undergoing deformation. We apply a number of different appearance and rendering parameters to these objects, and then use two user studies to measure whether appearance used for an object can have a statistically significant effect on the perception of its deformation. In another study, we adjust the number of objects simulated and investigate how this can influence the effect of appearance. We find that appearance can potentially influence people's sensitivity to differences of deformation as well as subjective rating of softness in our studies. Further analysis shows that, in simple scenarios, the effect of low-level cues in appearance can be dominant, even if high-level information delivered by appearance has the opposite implication. The third study shows that as the number of objects in a scenario increases, objects are perceived to be stiffer. Also, the effect of low-level cues is weaker.