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Head-mounted display versus desktop for 3D navigation in virtual reality: a user study

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Abstract

Virtual Reality (VR) has been constantly evolving since its early days, and is now a fundamental technology in different application areas. User evaluation is a crucial step in the design and development of VR systems that do respond to users’ needs, as well as for identifying applications that indeed gain from the use of such technology. Yet, there is not much work reported concerning usability evaluation and validation of VR systems, when compared with the traditional desktop setup. The paper presents a user study performed, as a first step, for the evaluation of a low-cost VR system using a Head-Mounted Display (HMD). That system was compared to a traditional desktop setup through an experiment that assessed user performance, when carrying out navigation tasks in a game scenario for a short period. The results show that, although users were generally satisfied with the VR system, and found the HMD interaction intuitive and natural, most performed better with the desktop setup.

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Acknowledgements

The authors wish to thank Pauline van der Horst, Frank van Huussen and Dr. Rafael Bidarra for their suggestions, as well as all the participants in the study.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Departamento de Electrónica, Telecomunicações e Informática, Univ. de Aveiro, Aveiro, Portugal

    Beatriz Sousa Santos, Paulo Dias, Samuel Silva & Joaquim Madeira

  2. IEETA—Instituto de Engenharia Electrónica e Telemática de Aveiro, Aveiro, Portugal

    Beatriz Sousa Santos, Paulo Dias, Samuel Silva & Joaquim Madeira

  3. Departamento de Economia, Gestão e Engenharia Industrial, Univ. de Aveiro, Aveiro, Portugal

    Angela Pimentel & Carlos Ferreira

  4. Faculty EEMCS, Delft University of Technology, Delft, The Netherlands

    Jan-Willem Baggerman

  5. CIO—Centro de Investigação Operacional, Universidade de Lisboa, Lisboa, Portugal

    Carlos Ferreira

Authors
  1. Beatriz Sousa Santos
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  2. Paulo Dias
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  3. Angela Pimentel
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  4. Jan-Willem Baggerman
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  5. Carlos Ferreira
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  6. Samuel Silva
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  7. Joaquim Madeira
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Correspondence to Beatriz Sousa Santos.

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Sousa Santos, B., Dias, P., Pimentel, A. et al. Head-mounted display versus desktop for 3D navigation in virtual reality: a user study. Multimed Tools Appl 41, 161–181 (2009). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11042-008-0223-2

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