Head-Mounted Virtual reality (VR) systems provide full-immersive experiences to users and completely isolate them from the outside world, placing them in unsafe situations. Existing research proposed different alert-based solutions to address this. Our work builds on these studies on notification systems for VR environments from a different perspective. We focus on: (i) exploring alert systems to notify VR users about non-immersed bystanders’ in socially related, non-critical interaction contexts; (ii) understanding how best to provide awareness of non-immersed bystanders while maintaining
presence and immersion within the Virtual Environment(VE). To this end, we developed single and combined alert cues - leveraging proxemics, perception channels, and push/pull approaches and evaluated those via two user studies. Our findings indicate a strong preference towards maintaining immersion and combining audio and visual cues, push and pull notification techniques that evolve dynamically based on proximity.
People
Publications
- Daniel Medeiros, Rafael Kuffner dos Anjos, Nadia Pantidi, Kun Huang, Mauricio Sousa, Craig Anslow, and Joaquim Jorge. Promoting Reality Awareness in VR through Proxemics. In Proceedings of IEEE Conference on Virtual Reality and 3D User Interfaces (VR), 2021.
