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Effects of Task Type and Wall Appearance on Collision Behavior in Virtual Environments

Sebastian Cmentowski, Jens Krüger

TL;DR

This paper investigates why players ignore virtual walls in VR and how task type and wall appearance influence this behavior. It adopts a mixed design with within-subject task manipulations and between-subject wall designs, measuring wall-crossing rates, walking trajectories, and presence perception. The key finding is that engaging, varied tasks greatly reduce wall-crossing, while wall opacity strongly deters crossing; wall realism had limited impact on behavior. The results offer actionable guidance for VR game design to preserve Plausibility Illusion while managing user safety and immersion.

Abstract

Driven by the games community, virtual reality setups have lately evolved into affordable and consumer-ready mobile headsets. However, despite these promising improvements, it remains challenging to convey immersive and engaging VR games as players are usually limited to experience the virtual world by vision and hearing only. One prominent example of such open challenges is the disparity between the real surroundings and the virtual environment. As virtual obstacles usually do not have a physical counterpart, players might walk through walls enclosing the level. Thus, past research mainly focussed on multisensory collision feedback to deter players from ignoring obstacles. However, the underlying causative reasons for such unwanted behavior have mostly remained unclear. Our work investigates how task types and wall appearances influence the players' incentives to walk through virtual walls. Therefore, we conducted a user study, confronting the participants with different task motivations and walls of varying opacity and realism. Our evaluation reveals that players generally adhere to realistic behavior, as long as the experience feels interesting and diverse. Furthermore, we found that opaque walls excel in deterring subjects from cutting short, whereas different degrees of realism had no significant influence on walking trajectories. Finally, we use collected player feedback to discuss individual reasons for the observed behavior.

Effects of Task Type and Wall Appearance on Collision Behavior in Virtual Environments

TL;DR

This paper investigates why players ignore virtual walls in VR and how task type and wall appearance influence this behavior. It adopts a mixed design with within-subject task manipulations and between-subject wall designs, measuring wall-crossing rates, walking trajectories, and presence perception. The key finding is that engaging, varied tasks greatly reduce wall-crossing, while wall opacity strongly deters crossing; wall realism had limited impact on behavior. The results offer actionable guidance for VR game design to preserve Plausibility Illusion while managing user safety and immersion.

Abstract

Driven by the games community, virtual reality setups have lately evolved into affordable and consumer-ready mobile headsets. However, despite these promising improvements, it remains challenging to convey immersive and engaging VR games as players are usually limited to experience the virtual world by vision and hearing only. One prominent example of such open challenges is the disparity between the real surroundings and the virtual environment. As virtual obstacles usually do not have a physical counterpart, players might walk through walls enclosing the level. Thus, past research mainly focussed on multisensory collision feedback to deter players from ignoring obstacles. However, the underlying causative reasons for such unwanted behavior have mostly remained unclear. Our work investigates how task types and wall appearances influence the players' incentives to walk through virtual walls. Therefore, we conducted a user study, confronting the participants with different task motivations and walls of varying opacity and realism. Our evaluation reveals that players generally adhere to realistic behavior, as long as the experience feels interesting and diverse. Furthermore, we found that opaque walls excel in deterring subjects from cutting short, whereas different degrees of realism had no significant influence on walking trajectories. Finally, we use collected player feedback to discuss individual reasons for the observed behavior.

Paper Structure

This paper contains 18 sections, 4 figures, 2 tables.

Table of Contents

  1. Introduction
  2. Related Work
  3. Walking in Virtual Environments
  4. Haptics and Surfaces
  5. Virtual Collisions
  6. Walking Behavior
  7. Study Design
  8. Research Questions and Hypotheses
  9. Wall Design and Testbed Scenario
  10. Tasks
  11. Procedure and Applied Measures
  12. Results
  13. IPQ
  14. Logged Data
  15. Discussion
  16. ...and 3 more sections

Figures (4)

  • Figure 1: Our four tested wall designs: Top row: abstract cuboid wall with 30% opacity (left) and 60% opacity (right). Bottom row: twine hedge with holes (left) and opaque wood wall (right), both matching the virtual scenario.
  • Figure 2: Schematic map depicting our testbed environment, featuring four interaction points (P1--P4) and three virtual walls (W1--W3). The images illustrate the different activities: in the puzzle task (left), items and interactions vary. In the repetitive task (right), participants only move coins between bowls.
  • Figure 3: Results from the data logged during the play sessions. Left: the percentage of subjects walking through at least one wall for each task and condition. Right: dot-plot of the wall collisions per participant and condition in the repetitive task.
  • Figure 4: Two exemplary walking trajectories of our study. The path's color changes from blue to green. Top: subject solving the riddle task and colliding once with a wall. Bottom: subject playing the repetitive task and ignoring the virtual walls most of the time.