Improving Visual Search Tasks by Bending the Virtual City Twins: A Preliminary Study in Virtual Reality

Abstract

Visually searching for physical entities can be challenging as other entities often block the targets. The rapid advancement of head-mounted displays (HMDs) and cyber-physical mappings in smart cities may offer an alternative solution, where users can quickly locate the target by manipulating the digital representations of their surrounding environments. For example, a user wearing an HMD can reveal the hidden target by “lifting” the cyber world to create a curved virtual map on top of the physical world. This paper presents a virtual reality (VR)-based preliminary study that investigates how such cyber-physical bending interaction affects visual search tasks. A virtual environment is used to emulate a physical world and its virtual twin. The results demonstrate that vertically bending the virtual twin can significantly improve users’ (N = 20) performance in a city infrastructure inspection task (160% faster) and a landmark navigation task (50% faster) in the virtual city environment.