Effects of Object Complexity in Occlusion, Structure, and Texture on 3D Virtual Object Observation in Virtual Reality

Virtual Reality (VR) environments involve users in 3D virtual object interactions and manipulation tasks. Many of these are for the purpose of 3D virtual object observation, such as viewing a reconstructed museum artifact in a virtual museum. In this paper, we present a study that investigated the effects of object complexity in occlusion, structure, and texture on 3D virtual object observation in VR. We implemented a direct manipulation technique that allows users to grab, move, rotate, and scale an object for close-up observations. Twenty participants used the technique to manipulate virtual objects of various levels of complexity in occlusion, structure, and texture, to complete observation tasks (search and classify marks). The results showed that among the three dimensions of object complexity, occlusion and texture have significant impacts on users’ observation task completion time, but structure showed no significant impact. Our work contributes to the understanding of object complexity for 3D object observation in VR environments.