Control Schemes for Room-Scale VR Games

Anonymous

Keywords: Virtual Reality Games, Room-Scale Virtual Reality, Control Schemes, Control Mappings, Head-Mounted Displays, Player Experience, Locomotion, Travel Techniques.

TL;DR: A mixed-methods study to evaluate the usability of two common control schemes in VR games.

Abstract: Since the 1990’s, most desktop 3D games have adopted the “mouselook” control scheme, in which the mouse simultaneously rotates the camera view, aims at targets and steers the avatar. Control schemes for virtual reality games are less standardized and must integrate input from additional devices into the control scheme, namely the head-mounted display and position sensors. We conducted a mixed-methods study to evaluate the usability of two common control schemes in VR games. The first was coupled (or gaze-directed, where the player moves in the direction the camera faces), and the second was decoupled (or hand-directed, where the player moves in the direction the avatar faces while being free to look around without affecting movement direction). Our participants used an Oculus Rift CV1 head-mounted display, Oculus Touch motion controllers and two positional sensors as input devices. We did not find significant differences between the control schemes in terms of quantitative usability metrics. However, our qualitative results indicated usability issues with the decoupled control scheme. When using the decoupled control scheme, participants found it difficult to maintain awareness of their avatar’s facing direction. The coupled control scheme was the most usable as judged by consistently positive feedback and the absence of major usability issues. These results highlight the importance of gathering qualitative user feedback in addition to quantitative usability metrics.

Track: HCI/visualization