Exploring the Effect of Gaze and Distance Guidance in Room-Scale Virtual Reality

Abstract

The growing popularity of virtual reality (VR) provides new opportunities for cultural heritage protection and online education. Many studies have investigated how to guide users to move to a specific view/position. However, the coguided interaction of position and gaze is still under researched. In this article, a novel interaction model named GazeTance Guidance (GTG) is proposed. This model utilizes head rotation and viewing distance to improve the effect of room-scale user guidance. To explore the efficiency of GTG, we conducted two within-subject studies with 25 and 31 participants navigating through virtual museums: first, we evaluated user acceptance of audio commentary and virtual guidance markers in terms of presence and user experience, and assessed the feasibility of memory tasks. second, we separately investigated the effects of gaze and distance guidance on motion sickness, cognitive load, memory efficiency, and user behavior. The experimental results prove that the guidance markers do not affect user experience and sense of presence. Compared with independent effects, the combination of gaze and distance guidance can reduce the user's motion sickness and significantly improve users' memory effect. These findings provide new inspiration for the interaction design of complex VR tours.