Exploring Metaphorical Transformations of a Safety Boundary Wall in Virtual Reality

Current virtual reality (VR) devices enable users to visually immerse themselves in the virtual world, contributing to their limited awareness of bystanders' presence. To prevent collisions when bystanders intrude into VR users' activity area, it is necessary to intuitively alert VR users to the intrusion event and the intruder's position, especially in cases where bystanders intrude from the side or behind the VR user. Existing intruder awareness cues fail to intuitively present the intrusion event in such cases. We propose a novel intruder awareness cue called "BrokenWall" by applying a metaphor of "a wall breached by invading soldiers" to the VR user's safety boundary wall. Specifically, BrokenWall refers to a safety boundary wall with a gap appearing in front of a VR user and rotating, guiding the user's attention toward an intruder coming from the side or behind the VR user. We conducted an empirical study (N = 30) comparing BrokenWall with existing awareness cue techniques, Halo and Radar. Halo employs a sphere to represent the intruder, with the size indicating proximity and the position reflecting the direction. Radar employs a radar map to visualize the intruder's position. The results showed that the BrokenWall awareness cue not only significantly reduces the time needed for users to detect an intruder but also has superior performance in subjective ratings. Based on our findings, we have established a design space for an interactive safety boundary wall to facilitate interactions between VR users and bystanders.