Exploring the Optimal Point of View in Third Person Out-of-Body Experiences

The way human perceive their environment depends strongly on the senses they have. One of them is the natural first person view using their eyes, which is limited regarding the field of view, perceived wavelengths or angular resolution. A third person view, which is often used in video games to provide a better visibility of the avatar and its surroundings, could overcome the limitations mentioned above to change the way humans visually perceive their environment. In this paper, we use an existing prototype consisting of a head-mounted display with an external camera to investigate the impact of a third person view regarding user experience and the evaluation of viewing angles. Besides manual view positioning by a user, we used an autonomic navigation task to compare both approaches. Results show that autonomic positioning shows significantly less errors than a manual positioning of the camera.