User Experimentation: An Evaluation of Velocity Control Techniques in Immersive Virtual Environments

While many of the existing velocity control techniques are well designed, the techniques are often application-specific, making it difficult to compare their effectiveness. In this paper, the authors evaluate five known velocity control techniques using the same experimental settings. They compare the techniques based on the assumption that a good travel technique should be easy to learn and easy to use, should cause the user to have few collisions with the VE, should allow the user to complete tasks faster, and should promote better recollection of the environment afterwards. In their experiments, they ask twenty users to use each velocity control technique to navigate through virtual corridors while performing information gathering tasks.