Freehand-Steering Locomotion Techniques for Immersive Virtual Environments: A Comparative Evaluation

ABSTRACT

Virtual reality has achieved significant popularity in recent years, and allowing users to move freely within an immersive virtual world has become an important factor critical to realize. The user’s interactions are generally designed to increase the perceived realism, but the locomotion techniques and how these affect the user’s task performance still represent an open issue, much discussed in the literature. In this article, we evaluate the efficiency and effectiveness of, and user preferences relating to, freehand locomotion techniques designed for an immersive virtual environment performed through hand gestures tracked by a sensor placed in the egocentric position and experienced through a head-mounted display. Three freehand locomotion techniques have been implemented and compared with each other, and with a baseline technique based on a controller, through qualitative and quantitative measures. An extensive user study conducted with 60 subjects shows that the proposed methods have a performance comparable to the use of the controller, further revealing the users’ preference for decoupling the locomotion in sub-tasks, even if this means renouncing precision and adapting the interaction to the possibilities of the tracker sensor.

Acknowledgments

We would like to thank the editor and the anonymous reviewers for their constructive comments, and the volunteers for the user study for their active participation in testing the different techniques.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Giuseppe Caggianese

Giuseppe Caggianese is a Researcher at the National Research Council of Italy. He obtained his Ph.D. in Methods and Technologies for Environmental Monitoring in 2013 from the University of Basilicata. His research interests lie at the intersection of virtual/augmented reality and HCI with applications in the cultural heritage and medicine.

Nicola Capece

Nicola Capece is currently a Research Fellow with the Computer Graphics Laboratory, University of Basilicata. He completed a Ph.D. in Computer Science in 2019 from the same University. His research interests include real-time and offline rendering, deep learning and computational photography, virtual and augmented reality, and human–computer interaction.

Ugo Erra

Ugo Erra is currently an Assistant Professor with the University of Basilicata, Department of Mathematics, Computer Science, and Economics, Potenza, Italy, where he is the founder and the head of the Computer Graphics Laboratory. His research interests concern computer graphics, information visualization, and artificial intelligence.

Luigi Gallo

Luigi Gallo is a Researcher at the National Research Council of Italy. He obtained a Ph.D. from the University of Naples in 2010 and undertakes research in HCI methods with applications in medicine and cultural heritage, publishing over 80 articles in topics such as Natural User Interfaces and Virtual/Augmented Reality.

Michele Rinaldi

Michele Rinaldi is a master’s student in Computer and IT Engineering at the University of Basilicata. His interests include human–computer interaction and computer graphics.