Virtual reality sickness typically results from visual-vestibular conflict. Because self-motion from optical flow is driven most strongly by motion at the periphery of the retina, reducing the user’s field-of-view (FOV) during locomotion has proven to be an effective strategy to minimize visual vestibular conflict and VR sickness. Current FOV restrictor implementations reduce the user’s FOV by rendering a restrictor whose center is fixed at the center of the head mounted display (HMD), which is effective when the user’s eye gaze is aligned with head gaze. However, during eccentric eye gaze, users may look at the FOV restrictor itself, exposing them to peripheral optical flow which could lead to increased VR sickness. To address these limitations, we develop a foveated FOV restrictor and we explore the effect of dynamically moving the center of the FOV restrictor according to the user’s eye gaze position. We conducted a user study (n=22) where each participant uses a foveated FOV restrictor and a head-fixed FOV restrictor while navigating a virtual environment. We found no statistically significant difference in VR sickness measures or noticeability between both restrictors. However, there was a significant difference in eye gaze behavior, as measured by eye gaze dispersion, with the foveated FOV restrictor allowing participants to have a wider visual scan area compared to the head-fixed FOV restrictor, which confined their eye gaze to the center of the FOV.
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This content will become publicly available on January 31, 2024
Virtual Big Heads in Extended Reality: Estimation of Ideal Head Scales and Perceptual Thresholds for Comfort and Facial Cues
Extended reality (XR) technologies, such as virtual reality (VR) and augmented reality (AR), provide users, their avatars, and embodied agents a shared platform to collaborate in a spatial context. Although traditional face-to-face communication is limited by users’ proximity, meaning that another human’s non-verbal embodied cues become more difficult to perceive the farther one is away from that person, researchers and practitioners have started to look into ways to accentuate or amplify such embodied cues and signals to counteract the effects of distance with XR technologies. In this article, we describe and evaluate the Big Head technique, in which a human’s head in VR/AR is scaled up relative to their distance from the observer as a mechanism for enhancing the visibility of non-verbal facial cues, such as facial expressions or eye gaze. To better understand and explore this technique, we present two complimentary human-subject experiments in this article. In our first experiment, we conducted a VR study with a head-mounted display to understand the impact of increased or decreased head scales on participants’ ability to perceive facial expressions as well as their sense of comfort and feeling of “uncannniness” over distances of up to 10 m. We explored two different scaling methods and compared perceptual thresholds and user preferences. Our second experiment was performed in an outdoor AR environment with an optical see-through head-mounted display. Participants were asked to estimate facial expressions and eye gaze, and identify a virtual human over large distances of 30, 60, and 90 m. In both experiments, our results show significant differences in minimum, maximum, and ideal head scales for different distances and tasks related to perceiving faces, facial expressions, and eye gaze, and we also found that participants were more comfortable with slightly bigger heads at larger distances. We discuss our findings with respect to the technologies used, and we discuss implications and guidelines for practical applications that aim to leverage XR-enhanced facial cues.
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- Award ID(s):
- 1800961
- NSF-PAR ID:
- 10442470
- Date Published:
- Journal Name:
- ACM Transactions on Applied Perception
- Volume:
- 20
- Issue:
- 1
- ISSN:
- 1544-3558
- Page Range / eLocation ID:
- 1 to 31
- Format(s):
- Medium: X
- Sponsoring Org:
- National Science Foundation
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