Exploring the Impact of Visual and Haptic Feedback on Eye-Hand Coordination and Embodiment in Virtual Reality
Creators: Lavoie, Ewen
Publisher: name: University of Alberta Library
Year: 2024

<p>Virtual Reality (VR) has emerged as a powerful tool for investigating human perception, cognition, and behavior. The ability to create immersive and interactive environments provides researchers with the opportunity to study human behavior in controlled and repeatable conditions. In recent years, there has been a growing interest in using VR to study human motor control and embodiment, which has led to the development of various VR systems for motor control studies.</p>

<p>The aim of this PhD thesis is to investigate the impact of visual feedback, haptic feedback, and their combination on embodiment and eye-hand coordination in VR. To achieve this, we conducted three studies that explored different aspects of VR object interaction.</p>

<p>The first study, described in depth in Chapter 2, investigated the effect of visual feedback on movements and embodiment in VR. We compared two VR object interaction conditions in which participants saw either a virtual replica of the controllers they held or a set of dynamic human-like limbs. Our results indicated that participants felt more embodied in VR when they saw the virtual limbs, compared to the virtual replica of the controllers. And, we found that participants who reported higher levels of ownership over their virtual limbs actually moved their bodies more differently between the two conditions, suggesting that body movement could be used as an objective measure for embodiment in VR environments.</p>

<p>In Chapter 3, we describe the second study, an investigation of the similarities and differences in eye-hand coordination during an object interaction task in VR and the real world. In short, we compared eye-hand coordination in a real-world task to the same task in controller-mediated VR. Our findings showed that participants visually fixated the object to be manipulated approximately the same amount of time in advance to their hand arriving at the object in VR and the real world. But, VR participants moved much slower, and spent more time visually fixated on their hand after the object was picked up, and after it had been released. We hypothesize that this is due to the limited haptic feedback provided in controller-mediated VR.</p>

<p>Finally, the third study is detailed in Chapter 4, where we investigated the impact of haptic feedback on embodiment and eye-hand coordination in VR. We used a set of VR gloves that tracked the location and orientation of participants’ hands and fingers as they interacted with objects in VR. We compared two VR object interaction conditions in which participants either received no haptic feedback or felt the actual real-world version of the virtual object they were seeing. Our results showed that participants were more embodied when they felt the objects in VR, and also exhibited eye-hand coordination behaviours closer to the real world dataset.</p>

<p>Overall, this PhD thesis provides new insights into how different VR object interaction conditions affect embodiment and eye-hand coordination. Our findings have implications for the continued study of embodiment, the design of VR systems for motor control studies, and have the potential to inform the development of more effective VR-based interventions for motor rehabilitation.</p>