Design and Preliminary Evaluation of Free-Hand Travel Techniques for Wearable Immersive Virtual Reality Systems with Egocentric Sensing

The recent availability of low cost wearable displays coupled with contactless motion sensing devices is leveraging the design of immersive and highly interactive virtual environments. In such virtual worlds, the human-computer interface, and particularly the navigation technique, plays a crucial role. This paper presents a preliminary evaluation of traveling constraints in egocentric vision. In more detail, we describe and compare in an ego-vision scenario two travel techniques, both based on a combination of visual controls and hand gestures but proving to be different in terms of the number of travel directions allowed to the user and of the travel velocity control. The experimental results indicate that, despite the users appreciating the possibility of controlling the travel direction with both head and arrows, not all the directions are considered useful in the same way. However, direct control of the velocity proves to affect positively the navigation experience in all the considered scenarios.