Srivastava Priyanka, Rimzhim Anurag, Vijay Palash, Singh Shruti, Chandra Sushil
Perception and Cognition Group, Cognitive Science Lab, Kohli Research Centre on Intelligent Systems, International Institute of Information Technology-Hyderabad, Hyderabad, India.
Department of Psychological Science, Central Connecticut State University, New Britain, CT, United States.
Front Robot AI. 2019 Jul 9;6:50. doi: 10.3389/frobt.2019.00050. eCollection 2019.
Use of virtual reality (VR) technology is proliferating for designing and upgrading entertainment devices, and creating virtual environments that could be used for research and training. VR is becoming a strong research tool by providing a tighter control on the experimental environment and by allowing almost limitless possibilities of creating ecologically valid stimuli. However, the enhanced fidelity between the real and virtual worlds that VR provides does not always benefit human performance. For a better understanding, and increasing VR's usability, we need to identify the relevant constituent components of immersive technologies, and differentiate their roles, for example, how visual and interaction fidelity differentially improves human performance. We conducted an experiment to examine how two common VR display modes, head mounted display (HMD) and desktop (DT), would affect spatial learning when we restrict ambulatory locomotion in HMD. This manipulation allowed examining the role of varying visual fidelity with low interaction fidelity. We used a between-group design with 40 naïve participants. They explored a virtual environment and later drew its sketch-map. Our results showed participants spent more time and perceived less motion-sickness and task effort using desktop than HMD VR. With reduced interaction fidelity, the high visual fidelity of HMD as compared to desktop resulted in similar or poorer performance on different spatial learning tasks after accounting for motion-sickness and workload effort. Participants were better in recalling spatial components related to junction and cyclic order of the navigated virtual space in desktop vs. HMD VR, and performed equally well on components related to street segments and object associations. We explain these results in terms of deficient idiothetic information in non-ambulatory HMD and lesser sensory conflicts in desktop mode. Overall, our results highlight the differential effect of visual vs. interaction fidelity on human performance based on using immersive technologies, how such an effect depends on the nature of cognitive and functional behavior users employ, and the higher usability of traditional desktop VR. These results are relevant for developing customized and sustainable virtual reality based human-computer interactions.
虚拟现实（VR）技术在设计和升级娱乐设备以及创建可用于研究和训练的虚拟环境方面的应用正在激增。VR通过对实验环境进行更严格的控制以及允许创造生态有效刺激的几乎无限可能性，正成为一种强大的研究工具。然而，VR所提供的真实世界与虚拟世界之间增强的逼真度并不总是对人类表现有益。为了更好地理解并提高VR的可用性，我们需要识别沉浸式技术的相关组成部分，并区分它们的作用，例如，视觉和交互逼真度如何不同地改善人类表现。我们进行了一项实验，以研究当我们限制头戴式显示器（HMD）中的自主运动时，两种常见的VR显示模式，即头戴式显示器（HMD）和桌面模式（DT），将如何影响空间学习。这种操作允许在低交互逼真度的情况下研究不同视觉逼真度的作用。我们采用组间设计，有40名新手参与者。他们探索了一个虚拟环境，然后绘制其草图。我们的结果表明，与HMD VR相比，参与者使用桌面模式时花费的时间更多，感觉晕动病和任务努力更少。在考虑晕动病和工作量努力后，与桌面模式相比，HMD的高视觉逼真度在交互逼真度降低的情况下，在不同的空间学习任务上导致相似或更差的表现。与HMD VR相比，参与者在回忆与桌面模式中导航虚拟空间的交汇点和循环顺序相关的空间组件方面表现更好，并且在与街道段和物体关联相关的组件上表现相当。我们根据非自主HMD中缺乏的本体感受信息和桌面模式中较少的感觉冲突来解释这些结果。总体而言，我们的结果突出了基于使用沉浸式技术的视觉与交互逼真度对人类表现的不同影响，这种影响如何取决于用户采用的认知和功能行为的性质，以及传统桌面VR的更高可用性。这些结果对于开发定制化和可持续的基于虚拟现实的人机交互具有重要意义。
