Improving Time and Space in VR
I collaborated on a mixed-methods study to identify what drives performance in VR navigation. My role centered on conducting usability tests and interviews, then building and analyzing a survey to test whether time spent across different interfaces affects user engagement and performance.
Skills Used:
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Usability Testing
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Survey Design and Analysis
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Interviews
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Cognitive Assessments
Context and Research Goals
I was tasked with exploring how body-based cues and piloting landmarks influenced user performance in VR navigation across different interfaces. My contribution centered on a time-based hypothesis: that time spent with video games, and the kind of games played, would predict a user's satisfaction and performance on certain interfaces. Users entered the study with very different amounts of video game exposure, and I wanted to know whether that history shaped their perception and engagement in VR navigation.
Methods
Usability testing: I led 60 users through usability testing of a field and a classroom environment with three VR interfaces that varied in how much body-based cues they preserved, from physical turning to fully discordant teleportation controlled by thumb input alone. Each user completed a triangle-completion task: traveling between three points, then pointing back to where they started, giving a consistent way to compare navigation accuracy across interfaces.
Cognitive assessments: Before entering VR, I had users complete Mental Rotation and Sense of Direction assessments that tested whether real-world spatial ability carried over into VR performance.
Interviews: I conducted interviews after each usability test to uncover which factors were influencing performance and immersion. These follow-up interviews suggested that unfamiliarity with thumb-based navigation used in many video games might be slowing some users down.
Survey: I built and validated a novel survey measuring prior video game exposure to test if video game history directly influences navigating in VR. I developed the survey items to capture participants’ time spent playing different video game genres within the past month.
Project Impact
I developed three design recommendations for VR navigation centered on interface design factors that can increase user performance and engagement:
Insights
The clearest driver of performance was the design of interface itself. Interfaces that preserved body-based cues consistently outperformed interfaces that removed those cues across both environments tested. The gap between the easiest and hardest interface narrowed the longer someone navigated in VR, meaning time-on-task closed a performance gap that gaming background couldn't explain.
Time spent gaming did not relate to performance but still mattered for preference: users with more time spent playing first-person games rated fully discordant teleportation higher than those with more time playing third-person games. This first-person preference for fully discordant teleportation persisted even when that user's performance was worse, meaning time spent playing games can cause some users to prefer interfaces that are harder to use.
Self-reported video game play time cannot be taken at face value. Users at both ends of the play-time spectrum gave the most extreme and unreliable self-estimates when asked for a specific number of hours spent playing. This points to a need for frequency-based scales since categorical ranges are less prone to guessing and rounding. Some users also counted watching someone else play a game as equivalent to playing it themselves, meaning video game surveys need to separate active control experience from passive observation.
