Evaluating Balance Recovery Techniques for Users Wearing Head-Mounted Display in VR

Room-scale 3D position tracking allows users to explore the virtual environment by physically walking. However, since the eyesight of the user is blocked by a Head-Mounted Display (HMD), the user might lose her balance because of bumping into real-world obstacles or shifting the body weight onto virtual objects that are inexistent in the real-world. This paper investigates assistive fall recovery methods under the assumption that the onset of the fall is given. Our experiment simulated the forward loss-of-balance with a tether-release protocol. A magnetic lock attached to a counter-weight was released while the subject was in a static leaning posture and engaged in a secondary 3D object selection task. The experiment uses a two by two design that examines two assistive techniques, i.e. video-see-through and auditory warning, at two different timing, i.e. fall onset and 500ms prior to onset. The data from 17 subjects show that the video-see-through triggered 500ms before the onset of fall can effectively help users recover from falls. Surprisingly, the video-see-through at the fall onset has a significant negative impact on the fall recovery providing similar results to the baseline condition (no intervention).

Author: 
Carlos Alfredo Tirado Cortes
Hsiang-Ting Chen
Daina Sturnieks
Jaime Andres Garcia
Stephen Lord
Chin-Teng Lin
Presented At: 
IEEE Transactions on Visualization and Computer Graphics PP(99):1-1
Year: 
2019
Type: 
Journal Article