Examining Effects of Technique Awareness on the Detection of Remapped Hands in Virtual Reality.

Input remapping techniques have been widely explored to allow users in virtual reality to exceed both their own physical abilities, the limitations of physical space, or to facilitate interactions with real-world objects. Often considered is how these techniques can be applied to achieve maximum utility, but still be undetectable to users to maintain a sense of immersion and presence. Existing psychophysical methods used to determine these detection thresholds have known limitations: they are highly conservative lower bounds for detection and do not account for complex usage of the technique. Our work describes and evaluates a method for estimating detection that reduces these limitations and yields meaningful upper bounds. We present the findings of our work where we apply this method to a well-explored hand motion scaling technique. In wholly unaware cases, we determined that users may detect their hand speed as abnormal at around 3.37 times the normal speed, compared to a scale factor of 1.47 that was estimated using traditional methods when users knew the motion scaling was occurring. A considerable number of participants in unaware cases (12 of 56) never detected their hand speed increasing at all, even at the maximum scale factor of 5.0. The study demonstrates just how conservative the thresholds generated by traditional psychophysical methods can be compared to detection during naive usage, and our method can be modified and applied easily to other techniques.

An Evaluation of View Rotation Techniques for Seated Navigation in Virtual Reality.

Head tracking is commonly used in VR applications to allow users to naturally view 3D content using physical head movement, but many applications also support turning with hand-held controllers. Controller and joystick controls are convenient for practical settings where full 360-degree physical rotation is not possible, such as when the user is sitting at a desk. Though controller-based rotation provides the benefit of convenience, previous research has demonstrated that virtual or joystick-controlled view rotation to have drawbacks of sickness and disorientation compared to physical turning. To combat such issues, researchers have considered various techniques such as speed adjustments or reduced field of view, but data is limited on how different variations for joystick rotation influences sickness and orientation perception. Our studies include different variations of techniques such as joystick rotation, resetting, and field-of-view reduction. We investigate trade-offs among different techniques in terms of sickness and the ability to maintain spatial orientation. In two controlled experiments, participants traveled through a sequence of rooms and were tested on spatial orientation, and we also collected subjective measures of sickness and preference. Our findings indicate a preference by users towards directly-manipulated joystick-based rotations compared to user-initiated resetting and minimal effects of technique on spatial awareness.