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Evaluation of Travel Techniques for Immersive Virtual Environments
Project Summary:
We performed a series of experiments in which we compared real walking in an immersive virtual environment to several common methods of achieving virtual travel with handheld controllers. Our results across experiments suggest that for complex environments requiring a large a number of turns, virtual travel is an acceptable substitute for real walking if the goal of the application involves learning or reasoning based on information presented in the virtual world. However, for applications that require fast, efficient navigation or travel that closely resembles real world behavior, real walking has advantages over common joystick-based virtual travel techniques.
 Real Walking |
 Virtual Travel |
Experiment 1: Complex, Multi-Level 3D Maze
This experiment focused on a complex, multi-level 3D environment designed as a two-story maze with objects placed throughout the corridor. Participants completed the maze using either real walking, gaze-directed virtual travel, or pointing-directed virtual travel, and completed a number of questionnaires testing their memory of the environment. While none of the conditions consistently outperformed each other on the memory tests, our results indicated that for tasks involving the naive exploration of a complex, multi-level 3D environment, the real walking technique supports a more efficient exploration than common virtual travel techniques, allowing faster completion times and fewer collisions with the environment geometry.E. Suma, S. Babu, and L.F. Hodges, "Comparison of Travel Techniques in a Complex, Multi-Level 3D Environment," IEEE Symposium on 3D User Interfaces 2007, pp. 147-153. (31% acceptance rate, BEST PAPER AWARD) PDF
Experiment 2: Complex Real World vs. Virtual Maze
In this experiment, we constructed a real world maze with visual and audio objects distributed throughout and modeled an identical virtual environment. Participants explored either the real or virtual maze for a predetermined amount of time using either real walking or a gaze-directed virtual travel technique. Participants that explored the real world maze performed better on tests of memory about the environment than those that explored the virtual environment, but there were no significant differences between real walking and virtual travel. However, analysis of tracker data revealed that participants' movements when using real walking were more similar to real world exploration than virtual travel. Surprisingly, real walking also contributed to greater amounts of reported simulator sickness than the virtual travel technique.E. Suma, S. Finkelstein, M. Reid, S. Babu, A. Ulinski, and L.F. Hodges, "Evaluation of the Cognitive Effects of Travel Technique in Complex Real and Virtual Environments," IEEE Transactions on Visualization and Computer Graphics, to appear. PDF
Experiment 3: Travel Technique and Attention
In this experiment, we compared real walking and the three most common virtual travel techniques for steering in an immersive virtual environment: (1) gaze-directed, (2) pointing-directed, and (3) torso-directed. Participants were instructed to follow a moving target as closely as possible throughout a maze-like grid of corridors. The study used a mixed design with travel technique as a between-subjects factor and path complexity (16 turns vs. 32 turns) and presence of secondary attention task (responding to spoken words) as within-subjects factors. We are currently in the process of analyzing the data from this experiment.A paper reporting this study is currently in preparation for submission.