Flying has been a dream for mankind for mil­lenia — but flying inter­faces for VR, gaming, and tele­op­er­a­tion (e.g., drones) typ­i­cal­ly rely on cum­ber­some double-joy­stick­/gamepads and do not allow for intu­itive and embod­ied flying expe­ri­ences. Here, we devel­op low-cost embod­ied flying inter­faces that adapt lean­ing-based motion cueing par­a­digms thus free­ing up hands for addi­tion­al tasks beyond just navigating.

Flying in vir­tu­al real­i­ty (VR) using stan­dard hand­held con­trollers can be cum­ber­some and con­tribute to unwant­ed side effects such as motion sick­ness and dis­ori­en­ta­tion. This paper inves­ti­gates a novel hands-free flying interface—HeadJoystick, where the user moves their head sim­i­lar to a joy­stick handle toward the target direc­tion to con­trol vir­tu­al trans­la­tion veloc­i­ty. The user sits on a reg­u­lar office swivel chair and rotates it phys­i­cal­ly to con­trol vir­tu­al rota­tion using 1:1 map­ping. We eval­u­at­ed short-term (Study 1) and extend­ed usage effects through repeat­ed usage (Study 2) of the HeadJoystick versus hand­held inter­faces in two within-sub­ject stud­ies, where par­tic­i­pants flew through a sequence of increas­ing­ly dif­fi­cult tun­nels in the sky. Using the HeadJoystick instead of hand­held inter­faces improved both user expe­ri­ence and per­for­mance, in terms of accu­ra­cy, pre­ci­sion, ease of learn­ing, ease of use, usabil­i­ty, long-term use, pres­ence, immer­sion, sen­sa­tion of self-motion, work­load, and enjoy­ment in both stud­ies. These find­ings demon­strate the ben­e­fits of using lean­ing-based inter­faces for VR flying and poten­tial­ly sim­i­lar telep­res­ence appli­ca­tions such as remote flight with quad­copter drones. From a the­o­ret­i­cal per­spec­tive, we also show how lean­ing-based motion cueing inter­acts with full phys­i­cal rota­tion to improve user expe­ri­ence and per­for­mance com­pared to the gamepad.

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[mediatags]flying-interfaces[/mediatags]

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