Body warping Versus Change blindness remapping
A Comparison of Two Approaches to Repurposing Haptic Proxies for Virtual Reality
7th-semester project in AAU-CPH Mediology course, as the title suggests the study compared two techniques for the purpose of extending physical proxies in VR, mainly which technique is better at manipulating co-location before it is noticeable. The team consisted of 2 students including myself and a supervising teacher.
One of the main motivations behind these techniques lies in training that requires certain interfaces for example airplane cockpit simulators, which are expensive to build and keep updated, but utilizing these techniques theoretically would reduce the coasts and potentially be more flexible to other types of training scenarios.
Our goal was to test both techniques for the same scenario and see which one would be less obvious when manipulated and better performing in the context of training. For that reason, we devised a simple setup with four physical buttons that each would accommodate six virtual buttons, meaning six different distances to compare four times, which we concluded to be the optimal repetitions to get valid results.
Like in previous projects gamified the procedure with a light narrative of a failing space station in which the participant has to complete the tasks in order to be saved. The task itself was to press buttons on a table in a certain order, which is randomly created at runtime.
The first big challenge came with the difference in the techniques, which in order to compare the tasks could not be completely different, it took a couple of iterations to come up with a viable system. More information about the system and the reasoning behind it is available in the video presentation for the conference.
The other big challenge was to map the virtual buttons to the physical ones and at the same time track the hand movement for interaction purposes. As we used Oculus Quest 2 for this project which has inside-out tracking we had to manually place the physical elements so everything is aligned consistently and hand tracking was a lesser issue since there is an inbuilt option to utilize the one provided by Oculus.
We found and concluded that change blindness remapping is both less noticeable, performed better, and also scored higher in the embodiment which would promote an overall better experience.