Navigating spaces is an embodied experience. Examples can vary from rescue workers trying to save people from natural disasters; a tourist finding their way to the nearest coffee shop, or a gamer solving a maze. Virtual reality allows these experiences to be simulated in a controlled virtual environment. However, virtual reality users remain anchored in the real world and the conventions by which the virtual environment is deployed influence user performance. There is currently a need to evaluate the degree of influence imposed by extrinsic factors and virtual reality hardware on its users. Traditionally, virtual reality experiences have been deployed using Head-Mounted Displays with powerful computers rendering the graphical content of the virtual environment; however, user input has been facilitated using an array of human interface devices including Keyboards, Mice, Trackballs, Touchscreens, Joysticks, Gamepads, Motion detecting cameras and Webcams. Some of these HIDs have also been introduced for non-immersive video games and general computing. Due to this fact, a subset of virtual reality users has greater familiarity than others in using these HIDs. Virtual reality experiences that utilize gamepads (controllers) to navigate virtual environments may introduce a bias towards usability among virtual reality users previously exposed to video-gaming. This article presents an evaluative user study conducted using our ubiquitous virtual reality framework with general audiences. Among our findings, we reveal a usability bias among virtual reality users who are predominantly video gamers. Beyond this, we found a statistical difference in user behavior between untethered immersive virtual reality experiences compared to untethered non-immersive virtual reality experiences.
Prior work on the evaluation of ubiquitous, smartphone driven 3DUIs helped guide our system architecture @cite_4 @cite_17 . A light-weight VR system is logistically a sound design when it comes to recruiting higher number of subjects for a research study. Other studies exist that looked into physical activity as a potential marker for performances in immersive VR environments. One such study suggested that physical activities of users can be a predictor for VR task performance @cite_4 . In regards to physical activity, virtual reality has also been explored as a means to motivate individuals to exercise, a concept better known as VR exergaming @cite_6 . While all these studies explore the relationship between physical activity and VR performance, there has been a lack of concrete connections between them. In contrast to quantifying physical fitness of users as suggested by @cite_15 @cite_6 , our approach shifts the attention of the user performance predictor to the gaming profile.
@cite_15 @cite_4 @cite_6 @cite_17
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Given the ease that humans have with using a keyboard and mouse in typical, non-colocated computer interaction, many studies have investigated the value of colocating the visual field and motor workspaces using immersive display modalities. Significant understanding has been gained by previous work comparing physical tasks against virtual tasks, visuomotor colocation versus non-colocation, and even visuomotor rotational misalignments in virtual environments (VEs). However, few studies have explored all of these paradigms in context with each other, and it is difficult to perform interstudy comparisons because of the variation in tested motor tasks. Therefore, using a stereoscopic fish tank display setup, the goal for the current study was to characterize human performance of a 3D Fitts' point-to-point reaching task using a stylus-based haptic interface in the physical, colocated non-colocated, and rotated VE visualization conditions. Five performance measures---throughput, efficiency, initial movement error, corrective movements, and peak velocity---were measured and used to evaluate task performance. These measures were studied in 22 subjects (11 male, 11 female, ages 20--32) performing a 3D variant of Fitts' serial task under 10 task conditions: physical, colocated VE, non-colocated VE, and rotated VEs from 45---315° in 45° increments. Hypotheses: All performance measures in the colocated VE were expected to reflect significantly reduced task performance over the real condition, but also reflect increased performance over the non-colocated VE condition. For rotational misalignments, all performance measures were expected to reflect the highest performance at 0°, reduce to the lowest performance at 90°, and rise again to a local maximum at 180° (symmetric about 0°). Results: All performance measures showed that the colocated VE condition resulted in significantly lower task performance than the physical condition and higher mean performance than the non-colocated VE condition, but the difference was not statistically significant. Also, rotation misalignments showed that task performance was mostly reduced to a minimum at 90°, 135°, and 225°. We conclude that colocated VEs may not significantly improve point-to-point reaching performance over non-colocated VEs. Also, visual rotations of ±45° affected throughput, efficiency, peak velocity, and initial movement error, but the number of corrective movements were not affected until ± 90°. A person's level of physical fitness can affect their health and many other factors in their lives. However, little is known about the effect of physical fitness on factors relevant to virtual environments. Towards addressing this knowledge gap, we performed a research study examining the relationship of several physical fitness measures with performance, presence, and simulator sickness during use of an HMD-based maze-type virtual environment. We recorded the trajectory of each participant through the maze. Following the virtual environment, participants reported simulator sickness, presence, and provided written and verbal feedback. Our analysis of the data shows a positive correlation between self-reported physical fitness and user performance. Further research is necessary to establish a causal relationship, and methods to make use of this new information in the design of virtual environments. Over the past few years, virtual reality has experienced a resurgence. Fueled by a proliferation of consumer-level head-mounted display and motion tracking devices, an unprecedented quantity of immersive experiences and content are available for both desktop and mobile platforms. However, natural locomotion in immersive virtual environments remains a significant challenge. Many of the VR applications available to date require seated use or limit body movement within a small area, instead relying a gamepad or mouse keyboard for movement within the virtual world. Lacking support for natural walking, these virtual reality experiences do not fully replicate the physical and perceptual cues from the real world, and often fall short in maintaining the illusion that the user has been transported to another place. We present a virtual reality demonstration that supports infinite walking within a confined physical space. This is achieved using redirected walking, a class of techniques that introduce subtle discrepancies between physical and virtual motions [ 2001]. When employed properly, redirected walking can be stunningly effective. Previous research has made users believe that they walked in a straight line when they actually traveled in a wide circle, or that they walked between waypoints in a long virtual hallway when in fact they went back and forth between the same two points in the real world. While perceptually compelling, redirected walking is challenging to employ effectively in an unconstrained scenario because users' movements may often be unpredictable. Therefore, our recent research has focused on dynamic planning and optimization of redirected walking techniques, enabling the system to intelligently apply redirection as users explore virtual environments of arbitrary size and shape [ 2014b] [ 2014a]. In this Emerging Technologies exhibit, attendees will explore a large-scale, outdoor immersive virtual environment in a head-mounted display (see Figure 1). The demonstration will support natural walking within a physical area of at least 6x6m, using a wide-area motion tracking system provided by PhaseSpace Inc. The virtual reality scenario will instruct users to scout the environment while stopping to take panoramic photos at various locations in the virtual world. As users explore the environment, our automated planning algorithm will dynamically apply redirection to optimally steer them away from the physical boundaries of the exhibit, thus enabling the experience of limitless walking in a potentially infinite virtual world (see Figure 2). One of the most disconcertingly unnatural properties of most virtual environments (VEs) is the ability of the user to pass through objects. I hypothesize that passive haptics, augmenting a high-fidelity visual virtual environment with low-fidelity physical objects, will markedly improve both sense of presence and spatial knowledge training transfer. The low-fidelity physical models can be constructed from cheap, easy-to-assemble materials such as styrofoam, plywood, and particle board. The first study investigated the effects of augmenting a visual-cliff environment with a slight physical ledge on participants' sense of presence. I found when participants experienced passive haptics in the VE, they exhibited significantly more behaviors associated with pit avoidance than when experiencing the non-augmented VE. Changes in heart rate and skin conductivity were significantly higher than when they experienced the VE without passive haptics. The second study investigated passive haptics' effects on performance of a real-world navigation task after training in a virtual environment. Half of the participants trained on maze navigation in a VE augmented with a styrofoam physical model, while half trained in a non-augmented VE but were given visual and audio contact cues. The task was to gain as much information as possible about the layout of the environment. Participants knew before the VE session that their training would be tested by navigating an identical real maze environment while blindfolded. Significant differences in the time to complete the blindfolded navigation task and significant differences in the number of collisions with objects were found between the participants trained in an augmented VE and the participants trained in a non-augmented VE. 11 of 15 participants trained without passive haptics bumped into the next-to-last obstacle encountered in the testing session and turned the wrong direction to navigate around it: only 2 of 15 participants trained with passive haptics made the same navigation error. On the other hand, the assessment of the participants' cognitive maps of the virtual environment did not find significant differences between groups as measured by sketch maps and object dimension estimation.