Subtle Attention Guidance for Real Walking in Virtual Environments

Virtual reality is today being applied to an increasing number of fields such as education, industry, medicine, or gaming. Attention guidance methods are used in virtual reality to help users navigate the virtual environment without being overwhelmed by the over-abundance of sensory stimuli. However, visual attention guidance methods can be overt, distracting and confusing as they often consist of artefacts placed in the center of the user’s field of view. This is the case for the arrow method, which consists of an arrow pointing towards a target object and which serves as a reference for our study. In this paper, we compare such an arrow to two methods that are less distracting and more subtle: haptic feedback and temporal luminance modulation. The haptic feedback method guides a user to a target using controller vibration. The temporal luminance modulation method makes use of flickering visual artefacts placed at the user’s peripheral field of view and thus do not cover regions of interest that are typically in the central field of view. This creates a subtle attention guidance since these flickering artefacts can be perceived by the user, but not recognized in terms of form and shape. To compare the different attention guidance methods, we designed a virtual environment that can be explored through real walking, wherein a user performs a search task. We then conducted a pilot study with seven participants to compare the haptic feedback and the temporal luminance modulation methods to the arrow method and to a baseline condition of navigation without any attention guidance. The preliminary results suggest that all three methods are more effective than the condition without guidance. Moreover, the temporal luminance modulation method appears to be comparable to the more effective, but non-subtle arrow method in terms of task completion time.