Movement Around Real and Virtual Cluttered Environments

Abstract

Two experiments investigated participants' ability to search for targets in a cluttered small-scale space. The first experiment was conducted in the real world with two field of view conditions (full vs. restricted), and participants found the task trivial to perform in both. The second experiment used the same search task but was conducted in a desktop virtual environment (VE), and investigated two movement interfaces and two visual scene conditions. Participants restricted to forward only movement performed the search task quicker and more efficiently (visiting fewer targets) than those who used an interface that allowed more flexible movement (forward, backward, left, right, and diagonal). Also, participants using a high fidelity visual scene performed the task significantly quicker and more efficiently than those who used a low fidelity scene. The performance differences between all the conditions decreased with practice, but the performance of the best VE group approached that of the real-world participants. These results indicate the importance of using high fidelity scenes in VEs, and suggest that the use of a simple control system is sufficient for maintaining ones spatial orientation during searching. MOVEMENT AROUND CLUTTERED ENVIRONMENTS

Do We Need to Walk for Effective Virtual Reality Navigation? Physical Rotations Alone May Suffice

“…2): Only 13.9% of the trials were finished without any revisits in the walking condition, and performance did not significantly drop further when physical motion cues were excluded for translations (real rotation condition) and rotations (joystick condition) (cf. % perfect trials (no revisits) Lessels & Ruddle (2005) Ruddle & Table 1. Analysis of variance and planned pairwise contrasts results for the different dependent variables.…”

“…In an important series of studies on navigational search in real and virtual environments, Ruddle and Lessels found that participants performed better when allowed to freely walk, as compared to a "real rotation" condition where they wore an HMD and could freely rotate while controlling simulated translations using a button-based motion model (Lessels & Ruddle, 2005;Ruddle & Lessels, 2006. This real rotation condition led to similar performance as a visual only condition, where both translations and rotations were only visually simulated on a desktop monitor, and controlled via keyboard presses and mouse motions, respectively.…”

“…In a real-world test, participants performed with almost perfect efficiency: participants found all eight targets without any re-visits of boxes in 93% of trials (Lessels & Ruddle, 2005). Even when blinders restricted the field of view to just 20°×16°, performance was not significantly reduced (87% perfect trials without revisits, see Fig.…”

“…Ruddle and Lessels performed a series of navigational search studies in which participants were in a real or virtual rectangular room that contained a regular arrangement of 32 pedestals, half of which had closed boxes placed on top (Lessels & Ruddle, 2005;Ruddle & Lessels, 2006. Participants were asked to search for eight target objects hidden in these 16 boxes.…”

Generating Trails Automatically, to Aid Navigation When You Revisit an Environment

“…Examples are systems that allow people to share GPS trails for hiking and mountain biking routes (e.g., www.memory-map.co.uk), and browser plug-ins that allow a person to follow a particular search path that someone took on the WWW (e.g., www.trexy.com). In VEs, specific trails have been used to illustrate an individual's path when reporting studies of navigation (e.g., Gamberini, Cottone, Spagnolli, Varotto, & Mantovani, 2003;Lessels & Ruddle, 2005). …”