Higher Cognitive Load Increases Unintended Positional Drift during Navigation in Virtual Reality

Abstract

Steering techniques are common for traveling in Virtual Reality (VR) applications. However, these techniques can generate Unintended Positional Drift (UPD), a phenomenon characterized by the user’s unconscious or unintentional physical movements of the users in the workspace. Although some research work has already investigated the influence of heading (i.e., how the virtual trajectory direction is updated) and cognitive load on travel performance using steering techniques, they did not investigate whether these factors could increase UPD. In this paper, we thus replicated and extended an existing user study to assess the influence of heading and cognitive task (CT) on UPD while navigating with steering techniques in VR. Participants had to perform a multidirectional travel task (based on the ISO 9241-9) while doing a CT (two-back task). We considered conditions with and without performing the CT, where we varied the steering heading (head, hand, torso). We compared our results with those of a previous study and found that the heading did not influence users’ travel and cognitive performance. However, we noticed the influence of workload on the user’s UPD. This work contributes to understanding UPD, which tends to be an overlooked topic, and the cognitive implications of navigation in VR. We discuss the design implications of these results for improving navigation in VR.