Field of View Effects on a Direct Manipulation Task in a Virtual Environment

Abstract

It is important for designers of virtual reality (VR) systems to understand how properties of the system interact with human processes to impact overall system performance. The following experiments investigated the field-of-view (FOV) characteristics of a VR system and how they affected aimed movement behavior across a natural and virtual environment. Utilizing three levels of FOV, and two levels of task difficulty, subjects performed a reciprocal tapping task. FOV was found to differentially affect movement time performance between the two environments for the moderate level of task difficulty, but not for the more highly difficult level. This significant effect for longer movement times in the virtual environment was traced to the smallest FOV, involving those targets appearing outside the instantaneous FOV. Movement times in the virtual environment were also uncharacteristically nonlinear across target configurations within the same level of difficulty. These findings, as well as other movement time differences between environments, are discussed in terms of image resolution, stereopsis and helmet weight considerations.