Effect of Visuomotor Colocation on 3D Fitts' Task Performance in Physical and Virtual Environments

Abstract

All performance measures in the co-located 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 highest performance at 0°, reduce to lowest performance at 90° and rise again to a local maximum at 180° (symmetric about 0°). All performance measures showed that the co-located 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 were mostly reduced to minimums at 90°, 135°, and 225°. We conclude that co-located 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°.