Concurrent locomotion and interaction in VR

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Can more embod­ied and lean­ing-based inter­faces help sup­port con­cur­rent loco­mo­tion and inter­ac­tion in VR when phys­i­cal walk­ing isn’t feasible?

Physical walk­ing is often con­sid­ered the gold stan­dard for VR travel when­ev­er fea­si­ble. However, espe­cial­ly for larger-scale vir­tu­al travel the free-space walk­ing areas are typ­i­cal­ly too small, thus requir­ing hand­held con­trollers to nav­i­gate, which can reduce believ­abil­i­ty, inter­fere with simul­ta­ne­ous inter­ac­tion tasks, and exac­er­bate adverse effects such as motion sick­ness and dis­ori­en­ta­tion. To inves­ti­gate alter­na­tive loco­mo­tion options, we com­pared hand­held Controller(thumbstick-based) and phys­i­cal walk­ing versus a seated (HeadJoystick) and standing/stepping (NaviBoard) lean­ing-based loco­mo­tion inter­faces, where seated/standing users travel by moving their head toward the target direc­tion. Rotations were always phys­i­cal­ly per­formed. To com­pare these inter­faces, we designed a novel simul­ta­ne­ous loco­mo­tion and object inter­ac­tion task, where users needed to keep touch­ing the center of upward moving target bal­loons with their vir­tu­al lightsaber, while simul­ta­ne­ous­ly stay­ing inside a hor­i­zon­tal­ly moving enclo­sure. Locomotion, inter­ac­tion, and com­bined per­for­mance was best for walk­ing and worst for con­troller. Leaning-based inter­faces improved user expe­ri­ence and per­for­mance com­pared to Controller, espe­cial­ly when standing/stepping using NaviBoard, but did not reach walk­ing per­for­mance. That is, lean­ing-based inter­faces HeadJoystick (sit­ting) and NaviBoard (stand­ing) that pro­vid­ed addi­tion­al phys­i­cal self-motion cues com­pared to con­troller improved enjoy­ment, pref­er­ence, spa­tial pres­ence, vec­tion inten­si­ty, motion sick­ness, as well as per­for­mance for loco­mo­tion, object inter­ac­tion, and com­bined loco­mo­tion and interaction.

Our “Lightsaber” task is illus­trat­ed below for the dif­fer­ent loco­mo­tion interfaces:

Controller

HeadJoystick

NaviBoard

Walking

[mediatags]proj–LightSaber[/mediatags]

Publications

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