  The emergence of social virtual reality (VR) experiences, such as Facebook
Spaces, Oculus Rooms, and Oculus Venues, will generate increased interest from
users who want to share real places (both personal and public) with their
fellow users in VR. At the same time, advances in scanning and reconstruction
technology are making the realistic capture of real places more and more
feasible. These complementary pressures mean that the representation of real
places in virtual reality will be an increasingly common use case for VR.
Despite this, there has been very little research into how users perceive such
replicated spaces. This paper reports the results from a series of three user
studies investigating this topic. Taken together, these results show that
getting the scale of the space correct is the most important factor for
generating a "feeling of reality", that it is important to avoid incoherent
behaviors (such as floating objects), and that lighting makes little difference
to perceptual similarity.
