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Preliminary Analysis on Interaction Characteristics with Auditive Navigation in Virtual Environments

Published: 29 June 2021 Publication History

Abstract

As access to new technologies becomes increasingly less expensive and complex, technologies such as virtual reality (VR) are also becoming interesting and relevant for applications outside consumer entertainment. Especially with VR for blind and visually impaired people, VR can overcome the limitations of real-world environments (e.g., hazardous locations and reliance on sighted companionship for training) by virtually exploring its digital model using consumer hardware. In this context, we conducted two within-subject user study with 11 and 5 participants that were asked to learn and re-walk an audio-landmark enriched path in a virtual environment. Our results showed, that the ability to learn and re-walk an audio landmark-enriched environment using an auditive only locomotion interface is possible, but yet difficult. To be able to re-walk even a simple corridor entails a relatively big training effort, but distinctive structures are recognizable again. The results also indicated that the intuitive use of controller based locomotion brings advantages over a keyboard and mouse based approach. Furthermore, we discovered different characteristics of auditive navigation (e.g., walking zigzag, in circles or collision-oriented with regard to the rooms’ walls), encountered acoustic rendering problems in acute corners and were able to show a training effect when having trained a path within a virtual environment with respect to re-walking, both inside a virtual environment and outside to a physically re-walked path. This work underlines the feasibility, problems, but also chances of different locomotion implementations in VR and is intended to foster future work towards both technical and methodological optimization in this area.

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  • (2022)A Typology of Virtual Reality Locomotion TechniquesMultimodal Technologies and Interaction10.3390/mti60900726:9(72)Online publication date: 25-Aug-2022

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PETRA '21: Proceedings of the 14th PErvasive Technologies Related to Assistive Environments Conference
June 2021
593 pages
ISBN:9781450387927
DOI:10.1145/3453892
Permission to make digital or hard copies of all or part of this work for personal or classroom use is granted without fee provided that copies are not made or distributed for profit or commercial advantage and that copies bear this notice and the full citation on the first page. Copyrights for components of this work owned by others than the author(s) must be honored. Abstracting with credit is permitted. To copy otherwise, or republish, to post on servers or to redistribute to lists, requires prior specific permission and/or a fee. Request permissions from [email protected].

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Association for Computing Machinery

New York, NY, United States

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Published: 29 June 2021

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Author Tags

  1. Virtual reality
  2. auditive navigation
  3. locomotion

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  • (2022)A Typology of Virtual Reality Locomotion TechniquesMultimodal Technologies and Interaction10.3390/mti60900726:9(72)Online publication date: 25-Aug-2022

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