This project will be facing the movement challenges of mobile virtual reality experiences based on mobile platforms, by testing empirically five different ways of locomotion (teleportation, tunnel vision, blink step, dash step and swinging the controller) within a given virtual space (climbing/hiking on a mountain and walking/reading in a museum). Exploring a mountain requires a more goal-directed approach in User Experience (UX), while the other relies on storytelling design. The experiment will consist of a mobile application encompassing the two scenarios and five locomotion techniques followed by a survey to quantify the participants’ feedback. The application will be developed in Unity and its scripts written in C#.
Keywords: cybersickness, locomotion, mobile platform, movement, virtual reality
Virtual reality (VR) is now ongoing extensive amount of research, as the new technology has implications in many fields including medicine. Its reach extends to treating mental health problems such as PTSD (McLay et al. 2011), anxiety (McLay et al. 2011; Repetto et al. 2011) and pain control (Sato et al. 2010; Hoffman et al. 2014; Hoffman et al. 2011). However, exposure of an user within a virtual environment (VE) has shown a range of uncomfortable symptoms such as headaches, nausea, vertigo, disorientation and eye strain (LaViola 2000; Stanney & Hash 1998; Lo & So 2001; Regan & Price 1994; Kim et al. 2005). Many of them are due to cybersickness (LaViola 2000; Stanney & Hash 1998; Lo & So 2001; Regan & Price 1994; Kim et al. 2005), a newly founded term denoting a sense of nausea and disorientation similar to sea sickness or car sickness, produced by a disbalance between what the inner ear of the user perceives and what the visual cues observe (Davis et al. 2014).
The current research focus relies on desktop systems such as Oculus Rift and HTC Vive (Davis et al. 2014; Cobb et al. 1999; Regan 1995), in contrast to mobile ones like Samsung Gear VR, Daydream or Google Cardboard which are more affordable on the market (Powell et al. 2016). The former have considerable hardware advantages to the smartphones, offering room-scale sensors for user tracking within a set spatial space (Waller et al. 2007), better display resolution and greater processing power. The best VR hardware available on mobile platforms is incapable of reaching the major headsets’ performances and it lacks in creating visual feedback about the real world to the user (Fang et al. 2017). Moreover, standalone systems such as Lenovo Mirage Solo or Oculus Go are just launching, henceforth no specific published research has been conducted just yet. They are head-mounted displays (HMD) which use frontal cameras to map the surrounding space of an user, compared to the sensors the desktop headsets use. For this study, the Daydream VR headset for smartphones is used, which provides a small Bluetooth-connected controller. Hence it allows VR developers with more possibilities of implementing movement, compared to any other mobile headset.
One of the components of virtual reality inducing cybersickness is the locomotion mechanics (So & Lo n.d.; McCauley & Sharkey 1992; Howarth & Finch 1999; Chance et al. 1998). The current paper defines “locomotion” as the ability to move from one place to another by feet, and “movement” will be often times used as a synonym. In Nabiyouni et al. (2015), the authors categorised locomotion techniques in natural, semi-natural and non-natural types. The natural way of moving in a virtual space would be to physically walk or run (Slater et al. 1994), while the semi-natural one involves the use of additional systems such as a treadmill (Slater et al. 1995). Non-natural ways of locomotion include the use of game controllers, which desktop headsets and DayDream currently use. These require the user’s engagement with the buttons and following certain visual cues for relocation within a virtual space.
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