Publication
The Importance of Virtual Hands and Feet for Virtual Reality Climbing
Felix Kosmalla; André Zenner; Corinna Tasch; Florian Daiber; Antonio Krüger
In: Extended Abstracts of the 2020 CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems. International Conference Extended Abstracts on Human Factors in Computing Systems (CHI EA-2020), April 25-30, Honolulu, HI, USA, CHI EA ’20, ISBN 9781450368193, Association for Computing Machinery, 2020.
Abstract
Virtual reality (VR) climbing systems registering physical climbing walls with immersive virtual environments (IVEs) have been a focus of past research. Such systems can provide physical user experiences similar to climbing in (extreme) outdoor environments. While in the real world, climbers can always see their hands and feet, virtual representations of limbs need to be spatially tracked and accurately rendered in VR, which increases system complexity. In this work, we investigated the importance of integrating virtual representations of the climber's hands and/or feet in VR climbing systems. We present a basic solution to track, calibrate and represent the climber's hands and feet, and report the results of a user study, comparing the importance of virtual limb representations in terms of perceived hand and feet movement accuracy, and enjoyability of the VR climbing experience. Our study suggests that the inclusion of feet is more important than having a hand visualization.