Evaluating the Effects of Haptics on Presence while Traveling in a Desktop Virtual Environment

Abstract

Virtual reality applications seek to fully immerse participants into their virtual world experience. The investigation of how stimuli on the different senses influence the users is therefore crucial. As navigation is one of the most ubiquitous tasks in virtual environments, studying the influence of haptics on user presence is a necessity for future applications. This work presents an empirical study on the role of haptics during travel in a desktop virtual environment. Three techniques were compared in respect to task performance, perceived task performance, perceived presence and mental and physical workload. While our results indicate that haptics has a positive influence on participant’s perceived presence and performance, his total workload remains constant. Furthermore, we show that these findings apply to both experienced and unexperienced virtual environment users.