Workload, Presence and Task Performance of Virtual Object Manipulation on WebVR

WebVR technology is widely used as a visualization approach to display virtual objects on 2D webpages. Much of the current literature on virtual object manipulation on the 2D screen pays particular attention to task performance, but few studies focus on users’ psychological feedback and no literature aims at its relationship with task performance. This paper compares manipulation modes with different degrees of freedom (DoF) in translation and rotation on WebVR to explore users’ workload and presence by self-reported data, and task performance by measuring completion time and error rate. The experiment results present that the increase of DoF is associated with lower perceived workload, while people may feel a higher level of presence during tasks. Additionally, this study only finds a positive correlation between workload and efficiency, and a negative correlation between presence and efficiency, which means that when feeling less workload or more presence, people tend to spend less time to complete translation and rotation tasks on WebVR.