Authors:
Noah Coomer
;
Joshua Ladd
and
Betsy Williams
Affiliation:
Rhodes College, United States
Keyword(s):
Virtual Environments, Spatial Updating, Locomotion.
Related
Ontology
Subjects/Areas/Topics:
Advanced User Interfaces
;
Augmented, Mixed and Virtual Environments
;
Computer Vision, Visualization and Computer Graphics
;
Graphical Interfaces
;
Interactive Environments
Abstract:
Virtual environments are often explored standing up. The purpose of this work is to understand if standing
exploration has an advantage over seated exploration. Thus, we present an experiment that directly compares
subjects’ spatial awareness when locomoting with a joystick when they are physically standing up versus
sitting down. In both conditions, virtual rotations matched the physical rotations of the subject and the joystick
was only used for translations through the virtual environment. In the seated condition, users sat in an armless
swivel office chair. Our results indicated that there was no difference between the two conditions, sitting
and standing. However, this result is interesting and might compel more virtual environment developers to
encourage their users to sit in a comfortable swivel chair. As an additional finding to our study, we find a
significant difference between the performance of males versus females and gamers versus non–gamers.