Effect of Visual Awareness of the Real Hand on User Performance in Partially Immersive Virtual Environments: Presence of Virtual Kinesthetic Conflict

摘要

Considering 3D interactions in Virtual-Reality (VR), it is critical to study how visual awareness of real hands influences users scaled interaction performance in different VR environments. We used Fitts's law to analyze user performance with five different Control-Display (CD) ratios (1:1 to 1:5). Fifteen participants performed a 3D selection task in three different setups: Head-Mounted Display (HMD), and two variations of the Active One-walled 3D Projection (AOP), with and without visual awareness of the real hand (AOP-A and AOP-B, respectively). The results show that the throughput of AOP-B is significantly higher than that of the AOP-A and HMD (p= .00001 and 0.0002, respectively) which suggests the existence of a conflict between the kinesthetic and visual real-hand movements, which we term as Virtual Kinesthetic Conflict (VKC). To reduce VKC during scaled movements, tasks should be designed such that the visual awareness of the real hand is avoided.