Influence of degrees of freedom's manipulation on performances during orientation tasks in virtual reality environments
Manuel Veit, Antonio Capobianco, Dominique Bechmann · 2009
In this paper we investigate the influence of the integration and separation of the Degrees Of Freedom (DOF) on the users' performances during 3-D orientation tasks. For this purpose, we compare the performances and the level of DOF's coordination users reached using two interaction techniques, one integrating and the other separating the task's DOF. To evaluate the degree of coordination, we propose a new behavioural measurement (called Magnitude of Degrees of Freedom's Separation), which provides the number of DOF simultaneously manipulated during an orientation task. The results of our study suggest that users are not able to integrate the manipulation of all the DOF during the whole task even using a direct manipulation technique. Moreover, if the interaction eases the task's decomposition, its use can lead to significant improvements regarding the achievement times. This result suggests that the simultaneous manipulation of all the DOF does not necessary lead to the best performances.