Comparative Study on the Reachability Distance Measurement Method: Difference Between the Real Environment and Mixed Reality Simulation

The study aimed to analyze the feasibility of Mixed-Reality (MR) in measuring reachability distance and to compare it with the real environment method. The effect of participants’ gender was also taken into consideration. Thirty-six subjects were recruited in this study. Subjects were asked to provide the reachability distance they perceived when they faced the confederate in both real environment and MR environment. Two-way ANOVA was used to clarify the relationship between the independent variables (participants’ gender and measurement method) and the dependent variable (reachability distance). The intraclass correlation coefficient was used to indicate the reliability of these two measurement methods. The experiment results showed that the distance measured in the MR environment was consistent with that collected in the real environment, and the MR simulation method showed higher reliability. For the gender effect, the reachability distance of male subjects was larger than that of female subjects. In addition, there was no significant interaction effect between gender and measurement method. The findings of this study validated the reliability of the MR simulation method when collecting reachability distance and proposed that MR technology was a promising tool in conducting psychological experiments and studying human behaviors.