Rowing Beyond: Investigating Steering Methods for Rowing-based Locomotion in Virtual Environments

Rowing has great potential in Virtual Reality (VR) exergames as it requires physical effort and uses physical motion to map the locomotion in a virtual space. However, rowing in VR is currently restricted to locomotion along one axis, leaving 2D and 3D locomotion out of the scope. To facilitate rowing-based locomotion, we implemented three steering techniques based on head, hands, and feet movements for 2D and 3D VR environments. To investigate these methods, we conducted a controlled experiment (N = 24) to assess the user performance, experience and VR sickness. We found that head steering leads to fast and precise steering in 2D and 3D, and hand steering is the most realistic. Feet steering had the largest performance difference between 2D and 3D but comparable precision to hands in 2D. Lastly, head steering is the least mentally demanding, and all methods had comparable VR sickness.