Object Selection project Proposal

Project Definition

To explore human behavior in VR environment, we want to study the performance of people in different conditions for a simple point and select task.

Task

• Pointing with controllers, and selecting objects (cubes/spheres) on sides of a hallway (4 meter long, 1.5 meter wide) in a limited time. Different Audio will be played when they clicked inside or outside of the object for audio feedback, and we will show the ray-cast as a visual feedback.

General Notes:

• • min distance to objects for walk conditions: 50 cm

  • Direction of virtual walking: down the hallway in a straight line

  • Direction of selection: Direction of the ray casted from controllers

  • We will choose targets in a way that people with average heights can see them in the FoV.

  • we’ll ask them to select as many targets as possible while minimizing the error.

Conditions

• Without walking Conditions

  • two controllers, for interacting

  • one controller, for interacting (dominant hand)

• Actual walking conditions

  • two controllers for interacting, actual walking

  • one controller for interacting (dominant hand), actual walking

• Virtual walking conditions

  • two controllers, both for interacting and virtual walking

  • two controllers, one for interacting (dominant Hand), one for virtual walking (non-dominant hand)

  • one controller, for interacting and virtual walking (dominant hand)

Study

• Before the experiment:

  • 1 minute practice time per condition

  • Demographics form (age, gender, handedness)

  • Familiarity with different technologies (Wii remote, Kinect for Xbox, Kinect for Windows, Leap Motion, Oculus, Vive, HoloLens, PS4 move controllers) that support gestural Interaction

• Design

  • • within subject

• Independent variables

  • Target width (3 levels) - 10, 20, 30

  • Target Density (2 levels) - 10, 20

  • Condition (7 levels)

• Dependent variables

  • Task completion time

  • Number of attempts

  • Number of errors

  • Selection Hand

• Number of Participants

  • • 5

• Number of Trials

  • • 5 participants * 7 conditions * 3 widths * 2 densities * 2 repeats = 420

• Order of Trials

  • Conditions: Latin Square

  • widths, densities: Randomized

  • Target Positions: Random positions from a predefined cube, half of them on right side and half on the left

• After Experiment

  • NASA TLX

  • short questionnaire on the experience based on the experiment to get feedback on preferences, etc.

Reference Material

This recent paper shows how in-air gestures are still ineffective and limited:

• Pham, H. A. (2018). The challenge of hand gesture interaction in the Virtual Reality Environment: evaluation of in-air hand gesture using the Leap Motion Controller.

Some ray-casting papers for virtual reality:

• Mayer, S., Schwind, V., Schweigert, R., & Henze, N. (2018, April). The Effect of Offset Correction and Cursor on Mid-Air Pointing in Real and Virtual Environments. In Proceedings of the 2018 CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems (pp. 1-13).

• Lee, S., Seo, J., Kim, G. J., & Park, C. M. (2003, April). Evaluation of pointing techniques for ray casting selection in virtual environments. In Third international conference on virtual reality and its application in industry (Vol. 4756, pp. 38-44). International Society for Optics and Photonics.

A paper that compares the tracker based, and control based input for virtual environment:

• A., Kulik, A., Huckauf, A., & Fröhlich, B. (2007, July). A comparison of tracking-and controller-based input for complex bimanual interaction in virtual environments. In Proceedings of the 13th Eurographics conference on Virtual Environments (pp. 43-52). Eurographics Association.

Expectations and Benefits

Expectations

We expect to find answer to the following research questions:

• We are interested to find out if having two controllers with the same functionalities would be more efficient in interactive VR applications in particular for pointing and selection.

• We are primarily interested to see for two controller conditions that participants can use both controllers for interaction, which one they choose. Do they point and select everything with one controller or do they switch between controllers based on the location of objects on right or left side of their positions?

Benefits

The result of this project will inform the following areas:

• Gesture-controlled application for motor rehabilitation

• Experiments informing motor behavior science

• More intuitive interaction types in an immersed environment

Platforms

The target platform is primarily head mounted display in particular VIVE, but we are planning to test it in CAVE2 as well.