Options Matter: Exploring VR Input Fatigue Reduction

Virtual and Augmented Reality are technologies that continue to touch the lives of consumers day in and day out. The very promise of immersion is what drives its consistent innovations, even years after the initial peak of interest. And much like the development of the mouse, input methods have to constantly be challenged and studied within all applicable domains to refine that immersion. In this paper, we present a VR user study that immerses participants in a more non-typical domain for VR, Art Exhibits. While the current VR community tends to lean towards controls that are typical for video gaming, this study showcases a set of alternative VR inputs that 16 participants used to roam and interface with a curated exhibit. By leveraging the newer technologies provided in the Meta Quest Pro, participant metadata was autonomously recorded, processed, and stored without any need for external systems. Based on the results from this user study, it was found that task completion times were slower for hand-tracked inputs compared to controller inputs. Additionally, there was no significant correlation found regarding the input accuracy between the three input methods.