Researchers at Stanford think that having a third arm in VR could make you a more efficient (virtual) human. So they’ve set out to learn what they can about the most effective means of controlling an extra limb in VR.
Thanks to high quality VR motion controllers, are beginning to reach into the digital world in an entirely new way. But this is virtual reality after all and we can do whatever we want, so why be restricted to a mere two arms? Researchers at Stanford’s Virtual Human Interaction Lab have finally said “enough is enough,” and have begun studying which control schemes are most effective for use with a virtual third arm.
Humans have only ever lived with two arms, which means that adding a third one is going to need to be easy to learn to control if it will be of any use. In a paper published in the journal Presence: Teleoperators and Virtual Environments, Bireswar Laha, Jeremy N. Bailenson, Andrea Stevenson Won, and Jakki O. Bailey defined three methods of controlling a third arm that extends outward from the virtual user’s chest.
The first method controls the arm view the user’s head. Turning and tilting the head causes it to move in a relatively intuitive way (not dissimilar to the sort of gaze-based UI designs we’ve seen in plenty of VR applications). The second method, which the researchers call ‘Bimanual’, uses the horizontal rotation of one controller combined with the vertical rotation of a second controller to act as inputs for the arm. And the third method, called ‘Unimanual’ uses the horizontal and vertical rotation of just a single controller to drive the third arm.
The paper, called Evaluating Control Schemes for the Third Arm of an Avatar, details an experiment the researchers designed to test the efficacy of each control scheme in virtual reality. The task set forth is for the user to tap the while block among a grid of blocks, with one set for the left arm, right arm, and a third set that’s further away and only reachable by the third arm. The paper’s abstract concludes:
Both the unimanual and the head-control were significantly faster, elicited significantly higher body ownership, and were preferred over the bimanual control schema. Participants felt that the bimanual control was significantly more difficult than the unimanual control, and elicited less appendage agency than the head-control. There were no differences in reported simulator sickness. We discuss the implications of these results for interface design.
The post Why Have 2 Arms When You Could Have 3? Stanford Studies Control Schemes for Three-armed Avatars in VR appeared first on Road to VR.
