SaVR: Increasing Safety in Virtual Reality Environments via Electrical Muscle Stimulation

PubDate: November 2020

Teams: University Duisburg-Essen

Writers: Sarah Faltaous；Joshua Neuwirth；Uwe Gruenefeld；Stefan Schneegass

PDF: SaVR: Increasing Safety in Virtual Reality Environments via Electrical Muscle Stimulation

Abstract

One of the main benefits of interactive Virtual Reality (VR) applications is that they provide a high sense of immersion. As a result, users lose their sense of real-world space which makes them vulnerable to collisions with real-world objects. In this work, we propose a novel approach to prevent such collisions using Electrical Muscle Stimulation (EMS). EMS actively prevents the movement that would result in a collision by actuating the antagonist muscle. We report on a user study comparing our approach to the commonly used feedback modalities: audio, visual, and vibro-tactile. Our results show that EMS is a promising modality for restraining user movement and, at the same time, rated best in terms of user experience.