This work introduces the Ocular Command Center framework to investigate how eye responses mediate visual effects on physiology and user experience in virtual reality. In a controlled study (N=40), participants experienced variations in luminance, color temperature, peripheral occlusion, and periodic visual suppression while eye activity (pupil size, blinks, fixations, and saccades), cardiovascular responses (heart rate and heart rate variability), and subjective symptoms were measured. Luminance changes affected heart rate through pupillary reflexes. Color temperature affected heart rate variability without pupillary mediation, suggesting appraisal processes, and induced severe nausea. Peripheral occlusion and visual suppression modified oculomotor behavior without substantial cardiovascular effects. These findings demonstrate that visual manipulations could act through distinct reflexive, cognitive, and perceptual pathways, and not all extend equally to systemic physiology. This foundation supports adaptive VR design, regulating comfort, engagement, and physiological state.
Visual search is a core component of mixed reality (MR) interactions, influenced by the complexities of MR application contexts. In this paper, we investigate how prevalent factors in MR influence visual search performance and spatial regularity memory --- including the physical environment complexity, secondary task presence, virtual content depth and spatial layout configurations. Contrary to prior work, we found that the secondary auditory task did not have a significant main effect on visual search performance, while significantly elevating higher perceived workload measures in all conditions. Complex environments and varied virtual elements depths significantly hinder visual search, but did not significantly increase perceived workload measures. Finally, participants did not explicitly recognize repeated spatial configurations of virtual elements, but performed significantly better when searching repeated spatial configurations, suggesting implicit memory of spatial regularities. Our work presents novel insights on visual search and highlights key considerations when designing MR for different application contexts.
Short-cycle repetitive collaborations are prevalent in industry and everyday life, where rapid turn-taking requires effective multimodal cues to convey collaborators’ intentions and action-timing. However, current remote collaboration in virtual reality (VR) relies heavily on visual cues, increasing fatigue and hindering communication. We investigated the impact of shared haptic feedback on remote collaborative experiences by measuring interpersonal synchrony and self-reported perceptions in a short-cycle, repetitive joint assembly task. We manipulated haptic conditions (Both, Self, Partner, None) based on feedback sources. Participants demonstrated higher action-timing synchrony with bi-directional haptic feedback than with uni-directional partner feedback. Notably, the heart rate synchrony was comparably induced in the Both and Self conditions, suggesting egocentric tendencies in interpreting others' intentions. Survey results corroborated the behavioral and physiological findings, highlighting the importance of bi-directional haptic feedback. Our findings establish shared haptic feedback as an effective means of enhancing remote collaboration while reducing the visual dependency of VR.
Numerous studies have investigated the effects of system fidelity as a whole on one’s total sense of presence in virtual reality (VR). The Fidelity-based Presence Scale (FPS), a recently introduced presence questionnaire, provides a method for investigating the effects of different system fidelities (interaction, scenario, and display) on different aspects of one’s sense of presence. In this paper, we present one of the first studies to investigate those effects for a locomotion task by conducting a 2 × 2 × 2 within-subjects experiment that reveals insight on how the components of system fidelity affect sense of presence. Like recent research, our results indicate that interaction fidelity and display fidelity significantly affect one’s interaction presence and display presence, respectively. However, unlike prior work, we did not find that changes in scenario fidelity significantly affected one’s scenario presence. We discuss other results and the possible implications of this research.
Accurate temporal expectations support interaction in virtual reality (VR), yet it remains unclear whether the internal models that guide such expectations in the real world transfer unchanged to immersive VR. We report two experiments examining expected durations of gravity-driven motion across real and virtual environments. In Experiment 1, participants imagined a ball rolling down ramps in a physical lab, a 1:1 VR replica, and an up-scaled VR room and produced the time the imagined process would take. Results revealed systematic distortions: durations were underestimated in VR relative to the physical lab, and larger virtual spaces elicited longer durations. Experiment 2 assessed whether participants incorporated gravity laws into their simulations. Although gravitational acceleration was consistently underestimated, it was incorporated in both real and virtual environments. Our findings show that VR and its spatial scale bias temporal expectations, with implications for the design of temporally coherent and physically plausible VR experiences.
People differ in how much they move their head versus their eyes when shifting gaze, yet such tendencies remain largely unexplored in HCI. We introduce head movement tendencies as a fundamental dimension of individual difference in VR and provide a quantitative account of their population-level distribution. Using a 360° video free-viewing dataset (N=87), we model head contributions to gaze shifts with a hinge-based parametric function, revealing a spectrum of strategies from eye-movers to head-movers. We then conduct a user study (N=28) combining 360° video viewing with a short controlled task using gaze targets. While parameter values differ across tasks, individuals show partial alignment in their relative positions within the population, indicating that tendencies are meaningful but shaped by context. Our findings establish head movement tendencies as an important concept for VR and highlight implications for adaptive systems such as foveated rendering, viewport alignment, and multi-user experience design.