The benefits of rotational head tracking

There are three common types of head tracking provided by virtual reality (VR) systems based on their degrees of freedom (DOF): complete 6-DOF, rotational 3-DOF, and translational 3-DOF. Prior research has indicated that complete 6-DOF head tracking provides significantly better user performance than not having head tracking, but there is little to no research comparing the three common types of head tracking. In this paper, we present one of the first studies to investigate and compare the effects of complete head tracking, rotational head tracking, and translational head tracking. The results of this study indicate that translational head tracking was significantly worse than complete and rotational head tracking, in terms of task time, task errors, reported usability, and presence. Surprisingly, we did not find any significant differences between complete and rotational head tracking. We discuss potential reasons why, in addition to the implications of the results.