VRisbee: How Hand Visibility Impacts Throwing Accuracy and Experience in Virtual Reality (CHI 2023)
Channel: Digital Media Lab
Date: 19/04/2023

Hand interaction plays a key role in virtual reality (VR) sports.While in reality, athletes mostly rely on haptic perception when holding and throwing objects, these sensational cues can be missing or differ in virtual environments. In this work, we investigated how the visibility of a virtual hand can support players when throwing and what impact it has on the overall experience. We developeda Frisbee simulation in VR and asked 29 study participants to hit a target. We measured the throwing accuracy and self-reports of presence, disc control, and body ownership. The results show a subtle advantage of hand visibility in terms of accuracy. Visible hands further improved the subjective impression of realism, body ownership, and subjective control over the disc.

Find the paper of our late-breaking work from @TheOfficialACM #CHI23 by @sigchi at
https://doi.org/10.1145/3544549.3585868

Malte Borgwardt, Jonas Boueke, María Fernanda Sanabria, @MichaelBonfert, Robert Porzel
Digital Media Lab, University of Bremen, Germany
Contact: bonfert at uni-bremen.de

KEYWORDS
human-computer interaction, virtual reality, throwing, embodiment, self-avatar, sports, research