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1. Boundaries facilitate spatial orientation in virtual environments

   https://doi.org/10.1145/3485279.3488284  

   Kelly, Jonathan W.; Terrill, Jason; Zimmerman, Moriah; Doty, Taylor A.; Cherep, Lucia A.; Hoover, Melynda T.; Powell, Nicole R.; Perrin, Owen J.; Gilbert, Stephen B. (November 2021, SUI '21: Symposium on Spatial User Interaction)

   Teleporting is a popular interface for locomotion through virtual environments (VEs). However, teleporting can cause disorientation. Spatial boundaries, such as room walls, are effective cues for reducing disorientation. This experiment explored the characteristics that make a boundary effective. All boundaries tested reduced disorientation, and boundaries representing navigational barriers (e.g., a fence) were no more effective than those defined only by texture changes (e.g., flooring transition). The findings indicate that boundaries need not be navigational barriers to reduce disorientation, giving VE designers greater flexibility in the spatial cues to include. 

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2. Boundaries Reduce Disorientation in Virtual Reality

   https://doi.org/10.3389/frvir.2022.882526  

   Kelly, Jonathan W.; Doty, Taylor A.; Cherep, Lucia A.; Gilbert, Stephen B. (June 2022, Frontiers in Virtual Reality)

   Virtual reality users are susceptible to disorientation, particularly when using locomotion interfaces that lack self-motion cues. Environmental cues, such as boundaries defined by walls or a fence, provide information to help the user remain oriented. This experiment evaluated whether the type of boundary impacts its usefulness for staying oriented. Participants wore a head-mounted display and performed a triangle completion task in virtual reality by traveling two outbound path segments before attempting to point to the path origin. The task was completed with two teleporting interfaces differing in the availability of rotational self-motion cues, and within five virtual environments differing in the availability and type of boundaries. Pointing errors were highest in an open field without environmental cues, and lowest in a classroom with walls and landmarks. Environments with a single square boundary defined by a fence, drop-off, or floor texture discontinuity led to errors in between the open field and the classroom. Performance with the floor texture discontinuity was similar to that with navigational barriers (i.e., fence and drop-off), indicating that an effective barrier need not be a navigational impediment. These results inform spatial cognitive theory about boundary-based navigation and inform application by specifying the types of environmental and self-motion cues that designers of virtual environments should include to reduce disorientation in virtual reality. 

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3. Rotational Self-motion Cues Improve Spatial Learning when Teleporting in Virtual Environments

   https://doi.org/10.1145/3385959.3418443  

   Lim, Alex F.; Kelly, Jonathan W.; Sepich, Nathan C.; Cherep, Lucia A.; Freed, Grace C.; Gilbert, Stephen B. (October 2020, Symposium on Spatial User Interaction)

   null (Ed.)

   Teleporting interfaces are widely used in virtual reality applications to explore large virtual environments. When teleporting, the user indicates the intended location in the virtual environment and is instantly transported, typically without self-motion cues. This project explored the cost of teleporting on the acquisition of survey knowledge (i.e., a ”cognitive map”). Two teleporting interfaces were compared, one with and one without visual and body-based rotational self-motion cues. Both interfaces lacked translational self-motion cues. Participants used one of the two teleporting interfaces to find and study the locations of six objects scattered throughout a large virtual environment. After learning, participants completed two measures of cognitive map fidelity: an object-to-object pointing task and a map drawing task. The results indicate superior spatial learning when rotational self-motion cues were available. Therefore, virtual reality developers should strongly consider the benefits of rotational self-motion cues when creating and choosing locomotion interfaces. 

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4. Evaluation of Point-to-Point Reaching Performance in Mixed Reality and Virtual Reality

   https://doi.org/10.1162/pres_a_00418  

   Petrie, Tyler G; Zhao, Chen; Fu, Michael J (September 2024, PRESENCE: Virtual and Augmented Reality)

   Abstract Recent immersive mixed reality (MR) and virtual reality (VR) displays enable users to use their hands to interact with both veridical and virtual environments simultaneously. Therefore, it becomes important to understand the performance of human hand-reaching movement in MR. Studies have shown that different virtual environment visualization modalities can affect point-to-point reaching performance using a stylus, but it is not yet known if these effects translate to direct human-hand interactions in mixed reality. This paper focuses on evaluating human point-to-point motor performance in MR and VR for both finger-pointing and cup-placement tasks. Six performance measures relevant to haptic interface design were measured for both tasks under several different visualization conditions (“MR with indicator,” “MR without indicator,” and “VR”) to determine what factors contribute to hand-reaching performance. A key finding was evidence of a trade-off between reaching “motion confidence” measures (indicated by throughput, number of corrective movements, and peak velocity) and “accuracy” measures (indicated by end-point error and initial movement error). Specifically, we observed that participants tended to be more confident in the “MR without Indicator” condition for finger-pointing tasks. These results contribute critical knowledge to inform the design of VR/MR interfaces based on the application's user performance requirements. 

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5. Redirecting Desktop Interface Input to Animate Cross-Reality Avatars

   https://doi.org/10.1109/VR51125.2022.00106  

   Woodworth, Jason W.; Broussard, David; Borst, Christoph W. (March 2022, 2022 IEEE Conference on Virtual Reality and 3D User Interfaces (IEEE VR))

   We present and evaluate methods to redirect desktop inputs such as eye gaze and mouse pointing to a VR-embedded avatar. We use these methods to build a novel interface that allows a desktop user to give presentations in remote VR meetings such as conferences or classrooms. Recent work on such VR meetings suggests a substantial number of users continue to use desktop interfaces due to ergonomic or technical factors. Our approach enables desk-top and immersed users to better share virtual worlds, by allowing desktop-based users to have more engaging or present "cross-reality" avatars. The described redirection methods consider mouse pointing and drawing for a presentation, eye-tracked gaze towards audience members, hand tracking for gesturing, and associated avatar motions such as head and torso movement. A study compared different levels of desktop avatar control and headset-based control. Study results suggest that users consider the enhanced desktop avatar to be human-like and lively and draw more attention than a conventionally animated desktop avatar, implying that our interface and methods could be useful for future cross-reality remote learning tools. 

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