Ece Yuksel & Didem Kadihasanoglu Department of Psychology, TOBB University of Economics and Technology, Ankara, Turkey 

Previous studies have shown that people use body-scaled information when perceiving action possibilities. For example, people use leg length information to perceive whether a platform is sit-on-able or not (Mark and Vogele, 1987; Stoffregen et al., 1999). In other words, even though the maximum sitting height changed as a function of participants’ size, it was fairly stable across participants when expressed as a proportion of participants’ leg length. Moreover, kinematic patterns in the optic flow are alone enough to perceive affordances for sitting (Stoffregen et al., 1999). The present study investigated whether people use their body-scaled information to determine whether a platform is sit-on-able in an immersive virtual reality (VR) environment. Using a mobile VR headset, sitting platforms with different heights were presented, and participants (N = 11) were asked to choose platforms to determine their preferred and maximum sitting heights. As expected, the preferred and maximum sitting heights increased as the height and leg length of the participant increased. However, the preferred and maximum sitting heights as a proportion of participant’s leg length were found to be stable around 0.64 (SD = 0.081) and 0.75 (SD = 0.062), respectively. The results suggest that people use body-scaled information to choose their preferred and maximum sitting heights in virtual reality environments.