Examining the Factors of Place Sameness: A Classroom Re-creation Task in a Virtual Environment

Virtual re-creations of real-world places are attractive and becoming more popular. Attractiveness of re-created place is commonly determined by the degree of visual similarity to the original places. Even if the re-creation has poor similarity to the original, there are cases in which people recognize and allow the re-creation to have similarity as the same entity. However, the mechanisms and factors behind this contradiction have not yet been studied. This is the first study focusing on the activity and meaningofpeoplewhentheyfeelsamenesstoare-createdplace. Thispaper investigates the concept of place sameness, which is defined as the degree of similarity between an original and a virtual re-creation that represents the original place. Further, the factors of place sameness are explored using a classroom re-creation task with virtual reality (VR) technology. The participants were instructed to recreate two classrooms within virtual environmentsusingvirtualfixtures. Asresults, thedisplaydevicesinRoom B, the student desks in Room A at the memory index, display devices in RoomA,andstudentdesksandothersinRoomBattheaveragedistancehad moderate or large correlations with the place sameness index. The results suggest that the reproducibility of the number of objects related to activities in a place, and the inaccuracy of the positions of objects are factors of place sameness. Our own interpretation of the uncanny valley effect of a place was also partially observed. The main contributions of this study are the proposal of the concept of place sameness as a new perspective for virtual re-creation research and the finding of promising factors for that.