Hi guys,
I am working on some research about scale perception in VR. I stuck in one issue about user height and eye height. I have some statistic values about eye height (anthropometry). About 11,7 cm for men and 10,6cm for woman counting from the end of the head. But I wonder if someone puts on HTC or Oculus on his head is the eye height and user height automaticly change to their real measurment? Is there any information about this? In documentation (Virtual Reality Best Practices) I found that I should set up user height to
176 cm and camera location to 160 cm. In my research I sholud be very accurate about this parameters so i don’t know which way is better - change manulay user height and eye height after people are putting on Headset or leave it to it own configuration and change anything. I would be grateful for any help
I develop with the Oculus Rift and have no experience with the Vive, so I can only talk about the first one.
The Oculus Rift has basically two tracking modes: Eye level and Floor level. From the SDK documentation:
User’s height is relevant only for Floor level tracking, but it is not personalized as far as I know. Instead, during the Oculus setup, the system asks for the height of the user who is doing the setup. Then, using a standard head-to-eye distance, the eye-level aka HMD height respect to the floor is determined. This information is used to determine the floor level. From there on, since the floor level is known, it doesn’t matter who is wearing the HMD or whether they stand/sit/squat etc., the system is always able to determine the HMD height respect to the floor.
Here is a link to a technical article describing how the tracking works: http://msl.cs.illinois.edu/~lavalle/papers/LavYerKatAnt14.pdf
You can also look into the official SDK documentation to understand how it all concurs to rendering the proper images for the left and right eye: http://static.oculus.com/documentation/pdfs/pcsdk/latest/dg.pdf
Hi Verross2,
according to marco’s post I am able to give you some information regarding the Vive.
For my masters thesis I created a VR app and also did an evaluation with 20 people who have none to little vr experience.
Evaluation was about multiplayer-, performance- as well as interaction-related issues, but there has been an interesting sideeffect:
Two of the testers were < 10 years old. They found some interactable features, like menues or objects were placed to high for them to reach, as the app and all elements were designed by me (183 cm).
Another tester was around 210 cm tall. She experienced some kind of fear while going through doors. she was afraid to hit her head. She was also able to stick her head through the roof sometimes 
As you can see, the Vive tracks the height of the headset while playing and applys it to the pawn in game.
hope this helps you!