The Field of Vision Through a Virtual Window to a Virtual Environment has a Smaller Effect than Age on Completion Time of a Dexterous Task

Abstract

The sense of body ownership and sense of embodiment are crucial parts of the virtual and augmented reality experience and are often enhanced by the use of virtual reality goggles. However, these goggles can be quite costly. This can pose a problem for institutions who have limited financial resources and need to train new recruits on dexterous tasks in a virtual environment. Finding an alternative to these goggles with reliable hand tracking technology can remove these barriers. One solution to this problem is orienting a desktop screen with a LEAP motion hand sensor behind the screen to create a ‘window’ into a virtual world. In order to determine whether the field of view, which could distort this virtual window, has an impact on the completion time of a task, we created a dexterity test inside the Unity game engine. This test required the participants to grasp a teleporting cube across 15 predetermined points on the screen with their virtual hands. We observed that there was a small effect on the completion time based on field of view and a larger effect based on age. However, these findings may not hold much statistical significance given its small sample size. Future studies and experiments should account for age as it does have surprising effects on the completion time of a dexterous task.