Holding Hands for
Short-Term Group Navigation in Social VR
Prior research has shown that social interactions in VR benefit from
techniques for group navigation that bring multiple users to a common destination together. In this work, we propose the metaphor of holding onto another user’s virtual hand for the ad-hoc formation of a navigational group and report on the positive results of an initial usability study in an exploratory two-user scenario.
Prompt
Lack of short-term group navigation techniques in commercial social VR platforms.
Storyboard
In virtual reality, navigating to a common location or following someone may be confusing which can lead the users to feel lost in the VR environment. This can happen due to various factors such as a narrow field of view, a lower degree of presence, and also a lower perception of depth. Group navigation helps users overcome some of these issues. In this section, the storyboard narrates a story of how users would use the holding hands' technique to overcome these issues.
Technique Design
From the storyboard and iterating many sketched prototypes of this technique we narrowed down the design choices which are explained in this section.
In a real-world scenario of two people holding hands while navigating through a city, the agreement to hold hands is mutually agreed upon. Similarly, our technique is designed in such a way that both users need to agree to form a group. This was designed in a way that both the users need to hold down their gripper continuously in order to remain grouped. During ideation, we predicted that some users might find this inconvenient but it gives constant explicit consent to maintain the grouping further which we considered as a trade-off.
Implementation
After finalizing the design, the technique was implemented on Unity3D. A hand was designed on Blender and imported into unity along with an animation for the technique. This virtual hand was linked to the user's controllers in the virtual environment.
The process for grouping is explained in the picture above from the perspective of users trying to group with one another. If either one of the users lets go of the controller button the ghost hand gets highlighted with the deactivation of the connecting ray.
Study Design
Methodology
We believe that the hand-holding metaphor is a fast and intuitive group navigation technique. To investigate the usage and acceptance of our technique, we conducted an initial usability study
Participants
We conducted an initial usability study with one female and five male participants (mean age: 28.8 years, σ = 3.4 years), who all had prior experiences with the use of head-mounted displays.
Data
Participants were asked to fill in three questionnaires, the System Usability Scale (SUS), the User Experience Questionnaire (UEQ), and a custom questionnaire on demographics and general comments.
Procedure
Participants were informed about the purpose of the study and gave their consent to participate. Then, the experimenter explained the navigation technique and allowed the participant to try it before introducing the following recorded task. In particular, participants were asked to bring the experimenter to four distinctive locations in the town indicated by arrows, where one of three collaborative activities had to be performed. These activities included the arrangement of furniture, a picture puzzle, and the placement of objects into a container. We found this mixture of collaborative navigation and manipulation helpful for provoking frequent forming and adjourning to study the suitability of the hand-holding metaphor in this regard. We recorded the total task completion time as well as the duration people spent holding hands.
Results
User Feedback
Conclusion
Based on the positive results of our study, we conclude that the hand-holding metaphor is a usable and appreciated method for the ad-hoc formation and adjournment of navigational dyads in social VR. It is a direct and playful metaphor suitable for closer friends, which was rated especially attractive, perspicuous, and stimulating. The main suggestions for improvement revolved around avoiding the constant press of the grip button for maintaining the grouping. This introduces a trade-off between reducing physical exertion and giving constant explicit consent to maintain the grouping further.