Effects of Redirection Methods in VR on the Sense of Autonomy and Competence

Topic Description

Commonly, virtual reality strives to provide realistic experiences that resemble interactions in the physical reality. However, in many cases, it is favorable to design interactions that deviate from real-world experiences to support the users in achieving their goals more effciently. Redirection is an umbrella term for interaction methods that disperse from the one-to-one mapping of users’ bodily input and their representation in the virtual environment through modulating the users’ body movements (2; 5). Although these techniques have been shown to facilitate efficient interaction while being hardly noticeable, their effects on the users’ sense of autonomy and competence remain underexplored. Yet, autonomy and competence are two essential aspects of satisfactory user experiences (1; 4). Especially in the context of accessibility, assistance requires substantial consideration to be usable and inclusive in the long term (3).
This thesis should investigate whether redirection techniques can be integrated in VR to support accessibility and how they need to be designed to promote high-quality VR experiences for users with physical disability.
This is a collaborative work between the Human-Centered Systems Lab and Human-Computer Interaction and Accessibility.

Task Summary

1. Literature Review Acquire an understanding of accessibility in VR and redirection methods.
2. Prototype Implementation Implement a VR prototype that supports a configurable redirection method.
3. Evaluation Evaluation of the redirection methods. Depending on the definite thesis goals, this can be, for example, a user study, an expert evaluation, a qualitative interview, or a heuristic evaluation.
4. Data Analysis Analysis of the collected data. Depending on the study design, this can involve methods from inferential statistics, qualitative analysis, and/or heuristic evaluations.
5. Discussion Synthesis of the analyzed data to answer the research questions.

Skills

Required: VR development, Interaction design

Beneficial: HCI evaluation methods

Contact

Dmitry Alexandrovsky

References

[1] Cimolino, G., Askari, S., and Graham, T. N. The role of partial automation in increasing the accessibility of digital games. Proceedings of the ACM on Human-Computer Interaction 5, CHI PLAY (Oct. 2021), 1–30.
[2] Feick, M., Regitz, K. P., Tang, A., Jungbluth, T., Rekrut, M., and Krüger, A. Investigating noticeable hand redirection in virtual reality using physiological and interaction data. In 2023 IEEE Conference Virtual Reality and 3D User Interfaces (VR) (Shanghai, China, Mar. 2023), IEEE, pp. 194–204.
[3] Gerling, K., Dickinson, P., Hicks, K., Mason, L., Simeone, A. L., and Spiel, K. Virtual reality games for people using wheelchairs. In Proceedings of the 2020 CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems (New York, NY, USA, Apr. 2020), CHI ’20, Association for Computing Machinery, pp. 1–11.
[4] Kilteni, K., Groten, R., and Slater, M. The sense of embodiment in virtual reality. Presence: Teleoperators and Virtual Environments 21, 4 (Nov. 2012), 373–387.
[5] Suma, E. A., Bruder, G., Steinicke, F., Krum, D. M., and Bolas, M. A taxonomy for deploying redirection techniques in immersive virtual environ