User Movement for Safety Training in a Virtual Chemistry Lab

Virtual Reality (VR) has become a large area of focus especially after the effects of COVID-19. During the lockdown students had to partake in different methods of learning outside of the traditional face-to-face classroom setting. In this paper, we focus on the type of locomotion that students would utilize when traversing in a virtual environment. We studied the effectiveness of two types of movement the first being Embodied Movement, or movement through the Head Mounted Display (HMD) device such as the Oculus Quest, or the HTC VIVE, and the second form of movement being Joystick Movement through the use of a thumb stick on an attached controller. To test these movements, we implemented a scenario in a virtual chemistry lab, where the user’s vision is impaired, and they would need to navigate throughout the scene to reach a safety shower that once activated would restore their vision. Our results show that using the joystick controller was more suitable for this type of experiment in terms of user preference and the speed of which the user completed the task. Our results also show that for some subjects when partaking in the study, mild cyber-sickness was prevalent and further investigation is needed on how to mitigate its effects.