The Importance of Virtual Hands and Feet for Virtual Reality Climbing

PubDate: April 2020

Teams: German Research Center for Artificial Intelligence，Saarland Informatics Campus

Writers: Felix Kosmalla；André Zenner；Corinna Tasch；Florian Daiber；Antonio Krüger

PDF: The Importance of Virtual Hands and Feet for Virtual Reality Climbing

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.