Effect of viewing mode on pathfinding in immersive Virtual Reality

The use of Head Mounted Displays (HMDs) to view Virtual Reality Environments (VREs) has received much attention recently. This paper reports on the difference between actual humans´ navigation in a VRE viewed through an HMD compared to that in the same VRE viewed on a laptop PC display. A novel Virtual Reality (VR) Navigation input device (VRNChair), designed by our team, was paired with an Oculus Rift DK2 Head-Mounted Display (HMD). People used the VRNChair to navigate a VRE, and we analyzed their navigational trajectories with and without the HMD to investigate plausible differences in performance due to the display device. It was found that people´s navigational trajectories were more accurate while wearing the HMD compared to viewing an LCD monitor; however, the duration to complete a navigation task remained the same. This implies that increased immersion in VR results in an improvement in pathfinding. In addition, motion sickness caused by using an HMD can be reduced if one uses an input device such as our VRNChair. The VRNChair paired with an HMD provides vestibular stimulation as one moves in the VRE, because movements in the VRE are synchronized with movements in the real environment.