Use Case Matters: Comparing the User Experience and Task Performance Across Tasks for Embodied Interaction in VR

Area of Science:

• Human-Computer Interaction
• Virtual Reality Technology
• Motion Capture Systems

Background:

• Integrated Virtual Reality (IVR) systems are crucial for avatar-mediated interactions in Virtual Reality (VR).
• Tracking architectures significantly influence the accuracy and completeness of user movement reconstruction on avatars.
• Current IVR systems often minimize hardware, but the trade-offs between accuracy, cost, and user experience are not well understood across diverse use cases.

Purpose of the Study:

• To compare the performance of three reduced user-worn IVR systems with different tracking architectures.
• To evaluate the impact of these systems on user experience and task performance in various simulated use cases.
• To provide guidance for selecting appropriate IVR systems based on specific application requirements.

Main Methods:

• A 3x5 mixed-design experiment comparing three IVR systems: Captury (markerless outside-in optical), Meta Movement SDK (markerless inside-out optical), and Vive Trackers (marker-based outside-in optical with IMUs).
• Participants performed five distinct tasks simulating different VR use cases.
• Evaluation focused on movement reconstruction accuracy and user experience across tasks.

Main Results:

• No single IVR system demonstrated consistent superiority across all evaluated tasks.
• The Meta Movement SDK performed best in fast-paced, hand-centric interactions.
• Captury and Vive Trackers showed better performance in lower-body movement tasks and full-body pose observation.

Conclusions:

• The effectiveness of reduced user-worn IVR systems is highly dependent on the specific use case.
• Practical guidance is offered for IVR system selection based on task demands.
• The study's tasks have been released as an open-source framework to facilitate future IVR system evaluations.