Take a Look Around - The Impact of Decoupling Gaze and Travel-direction in Seated and Ground-based Virtual Reality Utilizing Torso-directed Steering

Leaning (the upper body) has several times been shown to be a suitable virtual travel technique when being seated; in both, flying as well as ground-based scenarios. The direction of the steering method most commonly used is gaze/head-directed. However, this does not allow to inspect the environment independently from the direction of movement. The change to torso-directed steering allows for the latter and additionally does not take anything from the natural character of the leaning metaphor. We empirically investigated the impact of this freedom in a ground-based scenario and complemented the conditions with a virtual body-directed method and then crossed all with device-based control conditions. In the conducted study (n = 25), we found the torso-directed methods objectively performed the best (traveled distance, completion time & number of collisions), and found torso-directed leaning subjectively rated the most usable one.