Virtual Reality (VR) is redefining the way industries operate within the fast-paced world of modern technology. In 2021, the annual sales of VR headsets reached 6.1 million units and is forecasted to exceed 14.3 million across the world by 2024.
Industries have found new and effective applications for VR such as in architecture, where building designs can be showcased to clients in fully detailed and immersive environments with the ability to make real-time changes to model structures. Some companies have developed complete training modules to practice high risk procedures in a virtual environment reducing health and safety risks for workers.
“VR is being implemented at an increasing pace across a wide range of industries, and the need for improved accuracy and reliability is crucial,” says Dr Huawei Tu, Lecturer in Computer Sciences and Information Technology at La Trobe University. “Refining these parameters is the goal of our research.”
Dr Tu and his team are collaborating with Jinan University in China to examine how walking in VR affects the user’s ability to accurately select targets in the virtual environment and have produced design guidelines to improve the immersive experience in VR.
“Our team had experience studying Virtual Reality Locomotion and wanted to investigate the effects of walking and target selection in the virtual environment,” says Dr Tu.
“Our research has provided theoretical and empirical evidence to support various designs for different applications of VR across many industries.”
Participants were directed to walk on a treadmill and select targets fixed to the virtual environment in one experiment while a second experiment asked participants to select targets which were fixed relative to the user’s virtual body. This was completed using an Oculus Quest 2 VR headset coupled with a controller.
“We considered many factors such as walking speed, target size and distance to determine the accuracy of target selection while walking,” says Dr Tu.
The research team developed three constant walking speeds (0.8 m/s, 1.1 m/s 1.4 m/s), three different target sizes (20 cm, 25 cm and 30 cm) and three varying target depths (0.8m, 2.5m and 3.5m) to test the participants’ accuracy and determine the length of time to select all the required targets.
The study revealed that a slower walking speed resulted in a higher accuracy but longer completion time when participants selected targets fixed to the virtual environment. However, when the targets are fixed relative to the user’s body, walking faster led to reduced selection accuracy and longer completion time because targets would oscillate with each step of the participant.
“Based on our results, we offer a set of design guidelines that can specify user interface elements in VR according to users’ motor activities. These can significantly improve user experience when interacting with VR applications,” says Associate Professor Dr BoYu Gao from Guangdong Institute of Smart Education at Jinan University.
The study resulted in several design guidelines including increasing target sizes if users are moving quickly in the VR environment, moving targets closer to the user for greater accuracy regardless of walking speed, or display a warning if a user is moving too fast to maintain a higher level of accuracy and account for varying selection performance based on where targets are placed.
“Our future research will focus in two areas - one is to further understand the theoretical fundamentals of target selection performance in VR in the context of various motor activities,” says Dr Gao. “The second focus is to extend our results to more VR interaction scenarios with different devices. For example, we are currently conducting studies to explore user performance of target selection enduring walking with AR glasses.”
“Our hope is that we can better refine these devices, increasing accuracy and furthering their application possibilities in a wide array of professional fields.”
