Does Motion Matter?: Comparing Locomotion Interfaces in Virtual Environments Using Presence in Decision-Making Tasks

Virtual environments can replicate the appearance of terrain, but walking interfaces can confer sensations in other modalities incongruent with the visual presentation, and might therefore affect navigation decisions. I present a framework for examining the interaction of different locomotion interfaces with visual information and their effect on navigation decisions in virtual environments and present an experiment using this framework. For each trial in the experiment, participants moved towards a goal in a virtual room along one of two paths which differed visually, using either a joystick or a walking-in-place metaphor. Walking-in-place locomotion interfaces tended to be more natural under some visual conditions, as reflected in an increased likelihood of selecting the ecologically preferred path. The novel framework provides a way of studying factors in perceptual decision-making and demonstrates the effect of interface on natural behaviour.