Navigating a maze differently - a user study
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Navigating spaces is an embodied experience that all human beings undergo. These experiences can vary from rescue workers trying to save people from natural disasters; a tourist finding their way to the nearest coffee shop, or a gamer solving a maze. Virtual Reality (VR) allows these experiences and more to be simulated in a controlled virtual environment (VE).Traditionally, VR experiences have been deployed using Head-mounted displays (HMD) with powerful computers rendering the graphical content of the Virtual environment (VE); however, user input has been facilitated using an array of human interface devices (HID) including Keyboards, Mouses, Trackballs, Touchscreens, Joysticks, Gamepads, Motion detecting cameras and Webcams. Some of these HIDs have also been introduced for non-immersive video games and general computing. Due to this fact, a subset of VR users has greater familiarity than others in using these HIDs. VR experiences that utilize Gamepads (controllers) to navigate VEs introduce a bias towards usability among VR users previously exposed to video-gaming. This article presents a VR framework/experimental design to expose the usability bias among VR users using their experiential trajectory data and qualitative user feedback. Furthermore, we were able to show a normalizing effect in user behavior when exploring virtual environments using pure VR interface over a non-VR interface.
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