Cole Tauscher, Noah Weishan and Jivan Singh, “Effects of User Control on Preferred Translation Gain Values in Virtual Reality”
Mentor: Jerald Thomas, Computer Science, Engineering & Applied Science (College of)
Poster #40
Virtual reality (VR) is an ever-improving technology with great potential, but it is limited by its inconvenience of needing a large physical space for some applications. When a user reaches the edge of their physical space, they must perform a “reset” which requires them to turn around to have more space to move. Translation gain is a technique which is used to optimize this physical space by changing the amount of distance traveled in the virtual space compared to the physical space. In particular, large amounts of translation gain allow for more space to be covered before the user must reset. However, it is assumed that noticeable amounts of translation gain are undesirable and can cause discomfort to the user, but there is not much research to support this notion. The current study attempts to challenge this by seeing if users are troubled by noticeable translation gain. By creating a virtual environment that a user must traverse and perform resets in, a higher translation gain may be desirable to reduce the number of resets done. This is combined with a constant memory test throughout the experiment which can be interrupted by the resets, making resets even less desirable. The users themselves can change their translation gain to give them an opportunity to settle on an optimal translation gain level for their comfort, which will be measured through a survey after the experiment. The expectation is that users will prefer noticeable levels of translation gain to reduce the number of resets. If this expectation is true, future VR studies and programs may be more inclined to use larger translation gain optimizations.