Effects of Task Type and Wall Appearance on Collision Behavior in Virtual Environments

Fuente: arXiv
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Main Authors: Cmentowski, Sebastian, Krüger, Jens
Format: Preprint
Published: 2021
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author Cmentowski, Sebastian
Krüger, Jens
author_facet Cmentowski, Sebastian
Krüger, Jens
contents Driven by the games community, virtual reality setups have lately evolved into affordable and consumer-ready mobile headsets. However, despite these promising improvements, it remains challenging to convey immersive and engaging VR games as players are usually limited to experience the virtual world by vision and hearing only. One prominent example of such open challenges is the disparity between the real surroundings and the virtual environment. As virtual obstacles usually do not have a physical counterpart, players might walk through walls enclosing the level. Thus, past research mainly focussed on multisensory collision feedback to deter players from ignoring obstacles. However, the underlying causative reasons for such unwanted behavior have mostly remained unclear. Our work investigates how task types and wall appearances influence the players' incentives to walk through virtual walls. Therefore, we conducted a user study, confronting the participants with different task motivations and walls of varying opacity and realism. Our evaluation reveals that players generally adhere to realistic behavior, as long as the experience feels interesting and diverse. Furthermore, we found that opaque walls excel in deterring subjects from cutting short, whereas different degrees of realism had no significant influence on walking trajectories. Finally, we use collected player feedback to discuss individual reasons for the observed behavior.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2107_08439
institution arXiv
publishDate 2021
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle Effects of Task Type and Wall Appearance on Collision Behavior in Virtual Environments
Cmentowski, Sebastian
Krüger, Jens
Human-Computer Interaction
Driven by the games community, virtual reality setups have lately evolved into affordable and consumer-ready mobile headsets. However, despite these promising improvements, it remains challenging to convey immersive and engaging VR games as players are usually limited to experience the virtual world by vision and hearing only. One prominent example of such open challenges is the disparity between the real surroundings and the virtual environment. As virtual obstacles usually do not have a physical counterpart, players might walk through walls enclosing the level. Thus, past research mainly focussed on multisensory collision feedback to deter players from ignoring obstacles. However, the underlying causative reasons for such unwanted behavior have mostly remained unclear. Our work investigates how task types and wall appearances influence the players' incentives to walk through virtual walls. Therefore, we conducted a user study, confronting the participants with different task motivations and walls of varying opacity and realism. Our evaluation reveals that players generally adhere to realistic behavior, as long as the experience feels interesting and diverse. Furthermore, we found that opaque walls excel in deterring subjects from cutting short, whereas different degrees of realism had no significant influence on walking trajectories. Finally, we use collected player feedback to discuss individual reasons for the observed behavior.
title Effects of Task Type and Wall Appearance on Collision Behavior in Virtual Environments
topic Human-Computer Interaction
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2107.08439