Keep my head on my shoulders!: why third-person is bad for navigation in VR

Head-Mounted Displays are useful to place users in virtual reality (VR). They do this by totally occluding the physical world, including users' bodies. This can make self-awareness problematic. Indeed, researchers have shown that users' feeling of presence and spatial awareness are highly influenced by their virtual representations, and that self-embodied representations (avatars) of their anatomy can make the experience more engaging. On the other hand, recent user studies show a penchant towards a third-person view of one's own body to seemingly improve spatial awareness. However, due to its unnaturality, we argue that a third-person perspective is not as effective or convenient as a first-person view for task execution in VR. In this paper, we investigate, through a user evaluation, how these perspectives affect task performance and embodiment, focusing on navigation tasks, namely walking while avoiding obstacles. For each perspective, we also compare three different levels of realism for users' representation, specifically a stylized abstract avatar, a mesh-based generic human, and a real-time point-cloud rendering of the users' own body. Our results show that only when a third-person perspective is coupled with a realistic representation, a similar sense of embodiment and spatial awareness is felt. In all other cases, a first-person perspective is still better suited for navigation tasks, regardless of representation.