Designing presence for real locomotion in immersive virtual environments: an affordance-based experiential approach

Abstract

This paper describes a framework for designing systems for real locomotion in virtual environments (VEs) in order to achieve an intense sense of presence. The main outcome of the present research is a list of design features that the virtual reality technology should have in order to achieve such a goal. To identify these features, an approach based on the combination of two design strategies was followed. The first was based on the theory of affordances and was utilized to design a generic VE in which the affordances of the corresponding real environment could be evoked. The second was the experiential design applied to VEs and was utilized to create an experience of locomotion corresponding to that achievable in a real environment. These design strategies were chosen because of their potential to enhance the sense of presence. The proposed list of features can be utilized as an instrument that allows VE designers to evaluate the maturity of their systems and to pinpoint directions for future developments. A survey analysis was performed using the proposed framework, which involved three case studies to determine how many features of the proposed framework were present and their status. The result of such analysis represented a measure of the completeness of the systems design, of the affordances provided to the user, and a prediction of the sense of presence.

Footstep sounds synthesis: Design, implementation, and evaluation of foot–floor interactions, surface materials, shoe types, and walkers’ features

“…To this end, the cartoonification technique was adopted, which made the simulations computational efficient. Therefore, the developed synthesizer is suitable for interactive applications involving physical locomotion where timeliness is a fundamental requisite [78]. It can be utilized in conjunction with locomotion interfaces, such as instrumented shoes [75] or augmented floors [77,18], that are capable of displaying not only auditory but also plantar vibrotactile feedback.…”

“…The control of the synthesizer in the interactive case is achieved by means of locomotion interfaces, such as instrumented shoes [75,18] or augmented floors [77,18]. While the non interactive case has no limitations on the use of all the developed simulation features, when passing to technologically-mediated foot-floor interactions, the control of the synthesis algorithms needs to be adapted to the affordances of the locomotion interface at hand [78].…”

What do your footsteps sound like? An investigation on interactive footstep sounds adjustment

“…Designers of ecologically-valid virtual environments constantly seek to improve their technology in order to create experiences in the virtual world that can be as close as possible to those achievable in a real setting [1]. For a virtual environment to be meaningful in the ecological sense, users must be provided with coherent relations between perception and action.…”

Controlling VR Games: Control Schemes and the Player Experience

“…More recently, Boletsis and Cedergren [6] created a typology of the current VR locomotion techniques based on a literature review of techniques studied between 2014 and 2017. The review highlighted that these existing studies compare the usability of different interaction techniques, but none evaluate the usability of distinct control schemes for a technique [5,7,30,39,58,77]. Illustration 4, reproduced from Boletsis and Cedergren [6] shows a visual breakdown of the typology of locomotion techniques.…”

“…This research has established that VR is in general more immersive, albeit more difficult to control because of the imprecise nature of head tracking and other natural tracked input. With the rise of consumer VR, an explosion of new and old locomotion techniques for VR have been adopted, and several usability studies have compared them empirically [5,7,30,39,58,77]. However, prior work has not investigated the impact of different control schemes for VR games, and the existing research on VR control schemes needs to be updated for gaming-specific contexts and experienced gamers.…”