It is well known that locomotion-dominated navigation tasks may highly provoke cybersickness effects. Past research has proposed numerous approaches to tackle this issue based on offline considerations. In this work, a novel approach to mitigate cybersickness is presented based on online adaptative navigation. Considering the Proportional-Integral-Derivative (PID) control method, we proposed a mathematical model for online adaptive navigation parameterized with several parameters, taking as input the users' electro-dermal activity (EDA), an efficient indicator to measure the cybersickness level, and providing as output adapted navigation accelerations. Therefore, minimizing the cybersickness level is regarded as an argument optimization problem: find the PID model parameters which can reduce the severity of cybersickness. User studies were organized to collect non-adapted navigation accelerations and the corresponding EDA signals. A deep neural network was then formulated to learn the correlation between EDA and navigation accelerations. The hyperparameters of the network were obtained through the Optuna open-source framework. To validate the performance of the optimized online adaptive navigation developed through the PID control, we performed an analysis in a simulated user study based on the pre-trained deep neural network. Results indicate a significant reduction of cybersickness in terms of EDA signal analysis and motion sickness dose value. This is a pioneering work which presented a systematic strategy for adaptive navigation settings from a theoretical point.
Unfamiliar, large-scale virtual environments are difficult to navigate. This paper presents design guidelines to ease navigation in such virtual environments. The guidelines presented here focus on the design and placement of landmarks in virtual environments. Moreover, the guidelines are based primarily on the extensive empirical literature on navigation in the real world. A rationale for this approach is provided by the similarities between navigational behavior in real and virtual environments.
Mobile navigation apps are among the most used mobile applications and are often used as a baseline to evaluate new mobile navigation technologies in field studies. As field studies often introduce external factors that are hard to control for, we investigate how pedestrian navigation methods can be evaluated in virtual reality (VR). We present a study comparing navigation methods in real life (RL) and VR to evaluate if VR environments are a viable alternative to RL environments when it comes to testing these. In a series of studies, participants navigated a real and a virtual environment usin…
Arts et Métiers Institute of Technology（法国国立高等工程技术学院）；Hong Kong University of Science and Technology (Guangzhou)（香港科技大学（广州））
This work presents a dataset collected to predict cybersickness in virtual reality environments. The data was collected from navigation tasks in a virtual environment designed to induce cybersickness. The dataset consists of many data points collected from diverse participants, including physiological responses (EDA and Heart Rate) and self-reported cybersickness symptoms. The paper will provide a detailed description of the dataset, including the arranged navigation task, the data collection procedures, and the data format. The dataset will serve as a valuable resource for researchers to deve…
Virtual Reality enables the exploration of large information spaces. In physically constrained spaces such as airplanes or buses, controller-based or mid-air interaction in mobile Virtual Reality can be challenging. Instead, the input space on and above touch-screen enabled devices such as smartphones or tablets could be employed for Virtual Reality interaction in those spaces. In this context, we compared an above surface interaction technique with traditional 2D on-surface input for navigating large planar information spaces such as maps in a controlled user study (n = 20). We find that our …
Working in complex industrial facilities requires spatial navigation skills that people build up with time and field experience. Training sessions consisting in guided tours help discover places but they are insufficient to become intimately familiar with their layout. They imply passive learning postures, are time-limited and can be experienced only once because of organization constraints and potential interferences with ongoing activities in the buildings. To overcome these limitations and improve the acquisition of navigation skills, we developed Indy, a virtual reality system consisting i…
While virtual-reality (VR) has shown great promise in radiological tasks, effective user-interaction strategies that can improve efficiency and ergonomics are still under-explored and systematic evaluations of VR interaction techniques in the context of complex anatomical models are rare. Therefore, our study aims to identify the most effective interaction techniques for two common neurosurgical planning tasks in VR (point annotation and note-taking) from the state-of-the-arts, and propose a novel technique for efficient sub-volume selection necessary in neuroanatomical navigation. We assessed…
Strategies for finding one's way through an unfamiliar environment may be helped by computer generated 2D maps, 3D virtual environments, or other navigation aids. The relative effectiveness of 2D and 3D virtual navigation aids was investigated. The wayfinding experiments (navigation tests) were conducted in a large, park-like environment. 24 participants (12 men, 12 women; age range = 22-50 years; M=32, SD = 7.4) were divided into three groups of four individuals per gender, who 1) explored a computer generated 2D map of the given route prior to navigation, 2) received a silent guided tour by …
MetaSpace II (MS2) is a social Virtual Reality (VR) system where multiple users can not only see and hear but also interact with each other, grasp and manipulate objects, walk around in space, and get tactile feedback. MS2 allows walking in physical space by tracking each user's skeleton in real-time and allows users to feel by employing passive haptics i.e., when users touch or manipulate an object in the virtual world, they simultaneously also touch or manipulate a corresponding object in the physical world. To enable these elements in VR, MS2 creates a correspondence in spatial layout and o…
Mobile telepresence robots (MTRs) have become increasingly popular in the expanding world of remote work, providing new avenues for people to actively participate in activities at a distance. However, humans operating MTRs often have difficulty navigating in densely populated environments due to limited situation awareness and narrow field-of-view, which reduces user acceptance and satisfaction. Shared autonomy in navigation has been studied primarily in static environments or in situations where only one pedestrian interacts with the robot. We present a multimodal shared autonomy approach, le…
Aalto University（阿尔托大学）；The University of Queensland（昆士兰大学）；Queensland Brain Institute（昆士兰脑研究所）；Queensland University of Technology（昆士兰科技大学）；University of Oulu（奥卢大学）
With the advent of consumer-grade products for presenting an immersive virtual environment (VE), there is a growing interest in utilizing VEs for testing human navigation behavior. However, preparing a VE still requires a high level of technical expertise in computer graphics and virtual reality, posing a significant hurdle to embracing the emerging technology. To address this issue, this paper presents Delayed Feedback based Immersive Navigation Environment (DeFINE), a framework that allows for easy creation and administration of navigation tasks within customizable VEs via intuitive graphica…
Walking in a Virtual Environment is a bounded task. It is challenging for a subject to navigate a large virtual environment designed in a limited physical space. External hardware support may be required to achieve such an act in a concise physical area without compromising navigation and virtual scene rendering quality. This paper proposes an algorithmic approach to let a subject navigate a limitless virtual environment within a limited physical space with no additional external hardware support apart from the regular Head-Mounted-Device (HMD) itself. As part of our work, we developed a Virtu…
Web accessibility is actually the most important aspect for providing access to information and interaction for people with disabilities. However, it seems that the ability of users with disabilities to navigate over the Web is not dependent on the graphical complexity, but on the markup used to create the structure of the website. Consequently, it is necessary to design some software assistants to help all users to mark themselves in space during a navigation session. In this paper, we propose an assistant for browsing on the Internet to allow user to get one s bearings within Web navigation.…
We first discuss respective advantages of language interaction in virtual worlds and of using 3D images in dialogue systems. Then, we describe an example of a verbal interaction system in virtual reality: Ulysse. Ulysse is a conversational agent that helps a user navigate in virtual worlds. It has been designed to be embedded in the representation of a participant of a virtual conference and it responds positively to motion orders. Ulysse navigates the user's viewpoint on his/her behalf in the virtual world. On tests we carried out, we discovered that users, novices as well as experienced ones…
Volume Rendering applications require sophisticated user interaction for the definition and refinement of transfer functions. Traditional 2D desktop user interface elements have been developed to solve this task, but such concepts do not map well to the interaction devices available in Virtual Reality environments. In this paper, we propose an intuitive user interface for Volume Rendering specifically designed for Virtual Reality environments. The proposed interface allows transfer function design and refinement based on intuitive two-handed operation of Wand-like controllers. Additional inter…
Virtual reality (VR) has seen increased use for training and instruction. Designers can enable VR users to gain insights into their own performance by visualizing telemetry data from their actions in VR. Our ability to detect patterns and trends visually suggests the use of data visualization as a tool for users to identify strategies for improved performance. Typical tasks in VR training scenarios are manipulation of 3D objects (e.g., for learning how to maintain a jet engine) and navigation (e.g., to learn the geography of a building or landscape before traveling on-site). In this paper, we …
Using touch devices to navigate in virtual 3D environments such as computer assisted design (CAD) models or geographical information systems (GIS) is inherently difficult for humans, as the 3D operations have to be performed by the user on a 2D touch surface. This ill-posed problem is classically solved with a fixed and handcrafted interaction protocol, which must be learned by the user. We propose to automatically learn a new interaction protocol allowing to map a 2D user input to 3D actions in virtual environments using reinforcement learning (RL). A fundamental problem of RL methods is the …
