Cognitive State Inference from VR Motion via Motion Foundation Model

Fuente: arXiv
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Main Authors: Wen, Kaiang, Miller, Mark Roman
Format: Preprint
Published: 2025
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author Wen, Kaiang
Miller, Mark Roman
author_facet Wen, Kaiang
Miller, Mark Roman
contents As virtual reality (VR) becomes widespread, head and hand motion data captured by consumer systems has become substantially more common. However, the extent of what can be inferred from such motion remains unclear. This paper investigates whether transient cognitive states, specifically confusion, hesitation, and readiness during different stages of decision-making, can be inferred from VR telemetry alone. We introduce a novel dataset of head and hand motion collected during structured decision-making tasks, with frame-level annotations of these states. We evaluate classical machine learning models, temporal neural networks, and motion foundation models under two protocols: (1) future-in-time prediction for the same users, and (2) cross-user generalization to unseen users. We further propose a VR-native motion adapter that maps sparse VR telemetry to representations compatible with motion foundation models pretrained on large-scale full-body motion data, enabling transfer without explicit full-body reconstruction. To our knowledge, this is the first work to adapt a motion foundation model to VR motion for a classification task. Results show that motion-only sensing captures meaningful signals of cognitive states, and that pretrained motion foundation models generalize more effectively than classical and temporal models even with a small dataset of 24 participants. Our approach achieves 82% accuracy, comparable to and sometimes surpassing human observers. These findings suggest that VR motion encodes richer behavioral information than previously assumed and highlight the potential of large-scale motion pretraining for XR applications. We will release the dataset and modeling framework to support future research.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2509_24255
institution arXiv
publishDate 2025
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle Cognitive State Inference from VR Motion via Motion Foundation Model
Wen, Kaiang
Miller, Mark Roman
Human-Computer Interaction
Machine Learning
As virtual reality (VR) becomes widespread, head and hand motion data captured by consumer systems has become substantially more common. However, the extent of what can be inferred from such motion remains unclear. This paper investigates whether transient cognitive states, specifically confusion, hesitation, and readiness during different stages of decision-making, can be inferred from VR telemetry alone. We introduce a novel dataset of head and hand motion collected during structured decision-making tasks, with frame-level annotations of these states. We evaluate classical machine learning models, temporal neural networks, and motion foundation models under two protocols: (1) future-in-time prediction for the same users, and (2) cross-user generalization to unseen users. We further propose a VR-native motion adapter that maps sparse VR telemetry to representations compatible with motion foundation models pretrained on large-scale full-body motion data, enabling transfer without explicit full-body reconstruction. To our knowledge, this is the first work to adapt a motion foundation model to VR motion for a classification task. Results show that motion-only sensing captures meaningful signals of cognitive states, and that pretrained motion foundation models generalize more effectively than classical and temporal models even with a small dataset of 24 participants. Our approach achieves 82% accuracy, comparable to and sometimes surpassing human observers. These findings suggest that VR motion encodes richer behavioral information than previously assumed and highlight the potential of large-scale motion pretraining for XR applications. We will release the dataset and modeling framework to support future research.
title Cognitive State Inference from VR Motion via Motion Foundation Model
topic Human-Computer Interaction
Machine Learning
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2509.24255