Quantifying Locomotion Differences Between Virtual Reality Users With and Without Motor Impairments

Fuente: arXiv
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Main Authors: Franz, Rachel L., Wobbrock, Jacob O.
Format: Preprint
Published: 2025
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author Franz, Rachel L.
Wobbrock, Jacob O.
author_facet Franz, Rachel L.
Wobbrock, Jacob O.
contents Today's virtual reality (VR) systems and environments assume that users have typical abilities, which can make VR inaccessible to people with physical impairments. However, there is not yet an understanding of how inaccessible locomotion techniques are, and which interactions make them inaccessible. To this end, we conducted a study in which people with and without upper-body impairments navigated a virtual environment with six locomotion techniques to quantify performance differences among groups. We found that groups performed similarly with Sliding Looking on all performance measures, suggesting that this might be a good default locomotion technique for VR apps. To understand the nature of performance differences with the other techniques, we collected low-level interaction data from the controllers and headset and analyzed interaction differences with a set of movement-, button-, and target-related metrics. We found that movement-related metrics from headset data reveal differences among groups with all techniques, suggesting these are good metrics for identifying whether a user has an upper-body impairment. We also identify movement-, button, and target-related metrics that can explain performance differences between groups for particular locomotion techniques.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2510_07987
institution arXiv
publishDate 2025
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle Quantifying Locomotion Differences Between Virtual Reality Users With and Without Motor Impairments
Franz, Rachel L.
Wobbrock, Jacob O.
Human-Computer Interaction
Today's virtual reality (VR) systems and environments assume that users have typical abilities, which can make VR inaccessible to people with physical impairments. However, there is not yet an understanding of how inaccessible locomotion techniques are, and which interactions make them inaccessible. To this end, we conducted a study in which people with and without upper-body impairments navigated a virtual environment with six locomotion techniques to quantify performance differences among groups. We found that groups performed similarly with Sliding Looking on all performance measures, suggesting that this might be a good default locomotion technique for VR apps. To understand the nature of performance differences with the other techniques, we collected low-level interaction data from the controllers and headset and analyzed interaction differences with a set of movement-, button-, and target-related metrics. We found that movement-related metrics from headset data reveal differences among groups with all techniques, suggesting these are good metrics for identifying whether a user has an upper-body impairment. We also identify movement-, button, and target-related metrics that can explain performance differences between groups for particular locomotion techniques.
title Quantifying Locomotion Differences Between Virtual Reality Users With and Without Motor Impairments
topic Human-Computer Interaction
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2510.07987