Elicitation Study of Body Gestures for Locomotion in HMD-VR Interfaces in a Sitting-Position

Proxy gestures have proven to be a powerful tool and widely used for desktop and smartphone based user interactions. However, regarding its use for virtual travel in Virtual environments (VEs), specific limitation arises concerning the gestures naturalness, intuitiveness and the fatigue involved while performing the gesture in the real space. The proxy gestures must be natural, demand less effort and have the ability to move long virtual distances without colliding with the real-world boundaries. In this paper, we present a gesture elicitation study to find the most natural and intuitive body-gestures for the virtual travel task in three different VEs in a sitting position. This paper discusses our two experiments. In experiment 1, we extract the most natural and intuitive gesture by asking participants to perform gestures for virtual travel in three different VEs including selection and manipulation of objects in different difficulty levels. This is followed by the experiment 2, where a new group of 40 participants evaluated the extracted gestures based on appropriateness, ease of use of the gesture, effort and user preference. We identified the leaning gesture suitable for the virtual travel task in VE1 and VE3 and the pointing gesture suitable for the VE2. We discuss the results and qualitative findings of both experiments in this paper.