Abstract
When users in virtual reality cannot physically walk and self-motions are instead only visually simulated, spatial updating is often impaired. In this paper, we report on a study that investigated if HeadJoystick, an embodied leaning-based flying interface, could improve performance in a 3D navigational search task that relies on maintaining situational awareness and spatial updating in VR. We compared it to Gamepad, a standard flying interface. For both interfaces, participants were seated on a swivel chair and controlled simulated rotations by physically rotating. They either leaned (forward/backward, right/left, up/down) or used the Gamepad thumbsticks for simulated translation. In a gamified 3D navigational search task, participants had to find eight balls within 5 min. Those balls were hidden amongst 16 randomly positioned boxes in a dark environment devoid of any landmarks. Compared to the Gamepad, participants collected more balls using the HeadJoystick. It also minimized the distance travelled, motion sickness, and mental task demand. Moreover, the HeadJoystick was rated better in terms of ease of use, controllability, learnability, overall usability, and self-motion perception. However, participants rated HeadJoystick could be more physically fatiguing after a long use. Overall, participants felt more engaged with HeadJoystick, enjoyed it more, and preferred it. Together, this provides evidence that leaning-based interfaces like HeadJoystick can provide an affordable and effective alternative for flying in VR and potentially telepresence drones.
Highlights
Spatial updating is a largely automated mental process of establishing and maintaining the spatial relationship between ourselves and our immediate surroundings as we move around Wang (2016)
We investigate in this study if an embodied leaning-based flying interface can help improve users’ navigation performance in a 3D navigational search tasks that requires spatial updating, as well as improve other usability, performance, and user experience aspects in comparison to a commonly used dual-thumbstick flying interface
The current study provides the first compelling experimental evidence that providing partial body-based self-motion cues through leaning/head-movements with full physical rotation can improve performance in a virtual flying navigational search tasks that requires users to maintaining situational awareness through continuous spatial updating
Summary
Spatial updating is a largely automated mental process of establishing and maintaining the spatial relationship between ourselves and our immediate surroundings as we move around Wang (2016). As we move around through our environment and self-to-object relationships constantly change in non-trivial ways, our mind helps us to remain oriented by automatically updating our spatial knowledge of where we are with respects to relevant nearby objects in our surroundings. This ability allows us to navigate and interact with our immediate environment almost effortlessly Wang and Spelke (2002), Loomis and Philbeck (2008), McNamara et al (2008). This illustrates how critical it is to support reliable and automatic spatial updating in VR through, e.g., more embodied interaction and locomotion methods that can tap into such automatized and low-cognitiveload mechanisms
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