Am I Moving Along a Curve? A Study on Bicycle Traveling-In-Place Techniques in Virtual Environments

Abstract

There are many techniques for locomotion and navigation that can support the exploration of large virtual environments in a limited physical area. Previous studies focused on measuring curvature gains and bending gains applied to the walking direction in the real world. However, the effects of different moving techniques and their relationship with shapes and patterns of virtually moving paths have not been studied extensively before. In this study, we present our experimental results on how users perceive two different traveling-in-place techniques with different bending gains of moving paths using a hybrid electric bike simulator. Moreover, the impact of different factors including road textures, road widths, and road curve directions and their relationships with the techniques are investigated. Generally, users could travel along a curve without noticing with a point of subjective equality (PSE) at bending angle and a just-noticeable difference (JND) of 0.75 for a movement at around 20 km/h during 5 s. In addition, movement technique, curve direction, and future travel path significantly affected how they perceived the curvature of their travel path.