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An empirical comparison of interaction styles for map interfaces in immersive virtual environments

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Abstract

Geographical Information Systems (GIS) can be visualized using immersive technologies like Virtual Reality (VR). Before using this kind of technologies it is required to explore which interactions are affordable, efficient and satisfactory from the users’ point of view. The purpose of this work is to provide insight on how to design efficient and natural interaction on GIS VR interfaces. This study presents a within-subjects comparative study that assesses the usability and performance of two popular interaction strategies: body-based interaction and device based interaction. In body-based interaction, participants use their hands and head orientation to control the VR map. In the second case, users interact with the Oculus Touch controller. Thirty two users participated in an experiment whose results suggest that interacting with the controller improves performance of the selection task, in terms of time spent and error rate. Also, the results show a preference of users for the controller in terms of perceived usability.

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Acknowledgments

This work is supported by the project PACE funded by the Spanish Ministry of Economy, Industry and Competitiveness (TIN2016-77690-R).

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Computer Science, Universidad Carlos III de Madrid, Madrid, Spain

    Andrés Santos-Torres, Telmo Zarraonandia, Paloma Díaz, Teresa Onorati & Ignacio Aedo

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  1. Andrés Santos-Torres
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  2. Telmo Zarraonandia
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  3. Paloma Díaz
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  5. Ignacio Aedo
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Correspondence to Andrés Santos-Torres.

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Santos-Torres, A., Zarraonandia, T., Díaz, P. et al. An empirical comparison of interaction styles for map interfaces in immersive virtual environments. Multimed Tools Appl 79, 35717–35738 (2020). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11042-020-08709-9

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