Comparing four interaction techniques on a simple structured navigation task using a Head-Mounted Display

Virtual Reality (VR) is a scientific and technical domain that can provide mediums to dive users into an interactive 3D computer-generated world. Several processes of immersion bring to user the feeling of having quit the real world and of being present in the virtual environment, physically as well as psychologically (1,2). VR must provide a coherent experience in terms of sensory, cognitive and functional information (2). Fidelity, as the objective degree of exactness with which a system reproduces real-world, is hence a key point to design immersive VR-based systems. Since the 2010’s, low-cost cave automatic virtual environment (3) and many Head-Mounted Display (HMD) are available for immersive VR. However, navigate through 3D environments displayed in HMD is still challenging because it can cause sickness and disorientation. Since techniques based on haptic devices like keyboard and joystick have been extensively explored in the past, the present study aimed to investigate the impact of the navigation technique on performance on a simple traveling-centered task and the user experience with the HMD HTC Vive. Since techniques based on haptic devices like keyboard and joystick have been extensively explored in the past, the present study aimed to investigate the impact of the navigation technique on performance on a simple traveling-centered task and the user experience with the HMD HTC Vive. We compared four continuous navigation techniques: Arms Swinging, Walking-In-Place, Pointing and Touchpad. Results on the learning effect indicated that the repetition was especially beneficial for Directional Touchpad. On the user experience, the results revealed a general discomfort of attendees with the presented systems, but they found themselves competent at the end of the experiment in the accomplishment of the proposed task. Joysticks or directional was associated to a failure in using the gaze to orientate the camera view in virtual reality.