Manifest the Invisible: Design for Situational Awareness of Physical Environments in Virtual Reality
This addresses safety and comfort issues for VR users by enhancing awareness of physical surroundings, though it is incremental in improving existing design approaches.
The paper tackled the problem of reduced situational awareness in VR by designing five ambient information representations, finding that higher vividness increased awareness, consistency with the virtual environment reduced breaks in presence, and emotion-evoking designs improved engagement.
Virtual Reality (VR) provides immersive experiences in the virtual world, but it may reduce users' awareness of physical surroundings and cause safety concerns and psychological discomfort. Hence, there is a need of an ambient information design to increase users' situational awareness (SA) of physical elements when they are immersed in VR environment. This is challenging, since there is a tradeoff between the awareness in reality and the interference with users' experience in virtuality. In this paper, we design five representations (indexical, symbolic, and iconic with three emotions) based on two dimensions (vividness and emotion) to address the problem. We conduct an empirical study to evaluate participants' SA, perceived breaks in presence (BIPs), and perceived engagement through VR tasks that require movement in space. Results show that designs with higher vividness evoke more SA, designs that are more consistent with the virtual environment can mitigate the BIP issue, and emotion-evoking designs are more engaging.