Welcome

IEEE Transactions on Visualization and Computer Graphics

Traditional target-selection-based teleportation depends on the intersection of a (curved) ray with the scene's geometry, which limits navigation to points on the ground, restricting users' navigational freedom. While previous techniques exist that permit mid-air target selection, they are not optimal for transitioning between air and ground navigation, leading to inaccurate or lengthy interaction sequences. In this paper, we introduce SATOR, a new 3D teleportation technique designed to enable efficient and accurate navigation to both ground and mid-air targets by combining and enhancing previous approaches. Informed by the literature, we implemented four different parametrizations of our technique and compared them to a previously published technique that also enables both ground and mid-air target selection. Our user study with 30 participants indicates that SATOR is more efficient, accurate, and easier to use than the baseline. As a result, SATOR effectively helps users get an overview of the environment, observe features at different heights, or maneuver quickly around larger obstacles.

IEEE Transactions on Visualization and Computer Graphics

The Simulator Sickness Questionnaire (SSQ) has become a standard tool for quantifying the severity and distribution of discomfort symptoms in virtual reality (VR) research. Despite its straightforward administration, the use of the SSQ also comes with significant challenges, including response subjectivity, strict threshold values based on a military reference population, and confounding factors influencing the results. To demonstrate the adverse interplay of these issues, we asked three cohorts of students to fill in a SSQ after having attended a 90-minute lecture of our teaching program. Although students were not exposed to any form of VR experience, the resulting SSQ scores were indistinguishable from VR studies and extended far beyond the originally defined threshold of a “bad simulator', with 88.1% of TS scores being larger and 25.4% even exceeding thrice this value. We compare our results to alternative scoring systems of the SSQ proposed in the literature and suggest implications for future experimental designs involving the quantification of sickness symptoms. In summary, our results motivate to exert caution when interpreting the results of the SSQ in the context of a VR study; participants might just have attended a lecture prior to the experiment.

Acta Psychologica

Listening to a conversation between two talkers and recalling the information is a common goal in verbal communication. However, cognitive-psychological experiments on short-term memory performance often rely on rather simple stimulus material, such as unrelated word lists or isolated sentences. The present study uniquely incorporated running speech, such as listening to a two-talker conversation, to investigate whether talker-related visual cues enhance short-term memory performance and reduce listening effort in non-noisy listening settings. In two equivalent dual-task experiments, participants listened to interrelated sentences spoken by two alternating talkers from two spatial positions, with talker-related visual cues presented as either static faces (Experiment 1, n = 30) or animated faces with lip sync (Experiment 2, n = 28). After each conversation, participants answered content-related questions as a measure of short-term memory (via the Heard Text Recall task). In parallel to listening, they performed a vibrotactile pattern recognition task to assess listening effort. Visual cue conditions (static or animated faces) were compared within-subject to a baseline condition without faces. To account for inter-individual variability, we measured and included individual working memory capacity, processing speed, and attentional functions as cognitive covariates. After controlling for these covariates, results indicated that neither static nor animated faces improved short-term memory performance for conversational content. However, static faces reduced listening effort, whereas animated faces increased it, as indicated by secondary task RTs. Participants' subjective ratings mirrored these behavioral results. Furthermore, working memory capacity was associated with short-term memory performance, and processing speed was associated with listening effort, the latter reflected in performance on the vibrotactile secondary task. In conclusion, this study demonstrates that visual cues influence listening effort and that individual differences in working memory and processing speed help explain variability in task performance, even in optimal listening conditions.