Semantic anchors: How object familiarity and rotational context shape rotation perception in VR

Redirected Walking (RDW) enables navigation in large virtual worlds by manipulating a user's viewpoint, yet the perceptual thresholds governing these manipulations are often treated as fixed sensory limits. In this work, we propose the concept of Semantic Anchors: objects that stabilise self-motion perception through high-level cognitive priors. In a psychophysical experiment (N = 22), participants judged virtual rotations while viewing familiar or arbitrary objects of varying sizes and rotational reference frames. Results reveal that scene semantics do not merely modulate thresholds but fundamentally alter the integration of spatial cues. When a familiar object's canonical size was violated to create a specific size-congruency conflict, the window for imperceptible redirection expanded significantly, allowing rotation gains of up to 30% to remain imperceptible. Crucially, familiarity inverted the geometric dependence observed with arbitrary shapes: while geometric frames dictated sensitivity for abstract objects, semantic stability dominated for familiar ones. These findings demonstrate that RDW thresholds are dynamically co-constructed by sensory input and scene plausibility, offering a new principle for designing semantically informed locomotion systems that leverage cognitive expectations to expand explorable space. Like what you’re reading?

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Semantic anchors: How object familiarity and rotational context shape rotation perception in VR

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