BACKGROUND: Pseudo-Haptics, cross modal perceptions that can create the illusion of physical sensation, or haptic feedback, have shown
promise in improving user experience of virtual reality simulations, particularly those experiences that utilise freehand, mid-air
type interactions, which cannot provide haptic feedback to users. However, they have shown mixed results in improving the
performance of users in such cases. One hypothesis that explains the mixed results of user performance benefits is that the
feedback provided by pseudo-haptics is something that users look and wait for before carrying out a task, which results in
no increase in performance. This would still explain why, for more complex tasks, user performance does improve, as any
feedback at all may improve performance. As such, providing cursors to better guide actions such as grasping objects may
provide better performance and more confidence in users when utilising such systems.

OBJECTIVE: To gather evidence relating to the mechanisms behind the disparity in the results of studies regarding the benefits to user
experience and performance in order to provide better guidelines for the design of mid-air interaction based virtual reality
simulations.

DESCRIPTION OF WORK: The study will involve an experiment in a virtual reality simulation using free-hand interaction. The simulation itself will
feature a simple grasp and release task, performed multiple times in order to gather data on user performance. The task will
be performed several times with different feature sets. Common visual feedback techniques will be used, including object
highlighting and the highlighting of the user’s hand avatar when an object can be grabbed. These will be tested against two
different types of cursors, one showing the area around the hand that determines when an object can be grabbed, and a smaller
dot cursor placed in the center of that space. During the test, objective data will be collected including the amount of time it
takes for the user to complete the task, user accuracy and error rates and the total hand movement during the task. Afterwards,
subjective data will also be collected, including user confidence when interacting with the system and preferred feature set.

IMPACT: Based on the data collected, evidence will be collected either for or against the hypothesis, which will be able to help
provide recommendations regarding best design practices for future mid-air interaction systems.