An initial exploration of a multi-sensory design space: Tactile support for walking in immersive virtual environments

Abstract

Multi-sensory feedback can potentially improve user experience and performance in virtual environments. As it is complicated to study the effect of multi-sensory feedback as a single factor, we created a design space with these diverse cues, categorizing them into an appropriate granularity based on their origin and use cases. To examine the effects of tactile cues during non-fatiguing walking in immersive virtual environments, we selected certain tactile cues from the design space, movement wind, directional wind and footstep vibration, and another cue, footstep sounds, and investigated their influence and interaction with each other in more detail. We developed a virtual reality system with non-fatiguing walking interaction and low-latency, multi-sensory feedback, and then used it to conduct two successive experiments measuring user experience and performance through a triangle-completion task. We noticed some effects due to the addition of footstep vibration on task performance, and saw significant improvement due to the added tactile cues in reported user experience.

Effect of footstep vibrations and proprioceptive vibrations used with an innovative navigation method

“…Feng and al. [7] show that adding footstep vibrations increase slightly task performance and increase significantly user experience.…”

A SWOT Analysis of the Field of Virtual Reality for Firefighter Training

“…Little research has been done using olfactory stimulation in the VR firefighting domain, with some of the few studies stemming from research being done with very early VR hardware (Cater, 1994). Looking to the work by Feng et al (2016), using a combination of multisensory cues increases the user preference, with more cues relating to a higher preference. This highlights the second opportunity of multisensory VR simulations as not only a tool for higher physical fidelity, but also higher engagement possibly leading to increased training adherence.…”

Employing Mixed Reality Applications: Customer Experience Perspective

“…There is some research considering the effects of virtual storytelling [7] and narrative designs on multiple sensory modalities and environmental cues in surgeries [8]. More recently, multi-sensory effects on user experience and performance in virtual environments were researched [9]. The study analyzed the effects of tactile cues, movement wind, directional wind, footstep vibration and footstep sounds.…”

“…By testing service-and sensory designs as well as the potential of customer-experience management within MR technologies and environments, the study introduces a whole new re s e a rc h v e i n t o t he M R f i e l d , w h i c h h a s s o f a r concentrated on single technical features and their usability [e.g., 2,3]. Some studies have considered both user experience and sensory effects of different MR technologies and applications [7,8,9]. However, none of these studies considers the full potential of Proceedings of the 51 st Hawaii International Conference on System Sciences | 2018 URI: http://hdl.handle.net/10125/50032 ISBN: 978-0-9981331-1-9 (CC BY-NC-ND 4.0) service and experience management of MR technologies.…”