What You See is What You Get: Exploring Novel Hands-Free Methods of Virtual Body Control for Avatars

Despite the growing interest in making Virtual Reality (VR) applications more accessible to users with impairments, VR accessibility still remains critical. In the context of shared virtual environments where users are represented by an avatar, controlling and animating in real time this virtual body can be especially challenging for users that suffer from paraplegia or other impairments that strongly reduce mobility. This paper thus aims to explore new control modalities over an avatar in VR involving extremely little or no movement at all of users’ physical body. We conducted an experiment in which healthy participants (n=24) could control a virtual body via head-and eye-gaze interaction methods in a manipulation and a navigation tasks. Results indicated good usability scores with both methods and elicited a satisfying level of agency, while the workload constructs were significantly influenced by the interaction modality and the type of task carried out.