Comparing steering-based travel techniques for search tasks in a CAVE

We present a novel bimanual body-directed travel technique, PenguFly (PF), and compare it with two standard travel-by-pointing techniques by conducting a between-subject experiment in a CAVE. In PF, the positions of the user's head and hands are projected onto the ground, and travel direction and speed are computed based on direction and magnitude of the vector from the midpoint of the projected hand positions to the projected head position. The two baseline conditions both use a single hand to control the direction, with speed controlled discretely by button pushes with the same hand in one case, and continuously by the distance between the hands in the other case. Users were asked to travel through a simple virtual world and collect virtual coins within a set time. We found no significant differences between travel conditions for reported presence or usability, but a significant increase in nausea with PF. Total travel distance was significantly higher for the baseline condition with discrete speed selection, whereas travel accuracy in terms of coin-to-distance ratio was higher with PF.