The Importance of Accurate Head Registration for Fine Motor Performance in VR

Many virtual reality researchers consider exact head registration and an exact multi-sensory alignment between real world and virtual objects to be a critical factor for ef-fective motor performance in a virtual environment. Calibration procedures for head-mounted displays, however, can be error prone, time consuming and sometimes im-practical to perform. To better understand the relationship between head registrationand fine motor performance, we conducted a series of reciprocal tapping tasks underfour conditions: real world tapping, virtual reality with correct head registration, virtualreality with mildly perturbed head registration, and virtual reality with highly perturbedhead registration. As might be expected, virtual reality performance was worse thanreal world performance. There was no effect of head registration perturbation on motorperformance in the tapping tasks. We believe that sensorimotor adaptation enabled sub-jects to perform equally well in the three virtual reality conditions despite the incorrecthead registration in two of the conditions. This suggests that exact head registrationmay not be as critically important as previously thought, and that extensive per-usercalibration procedures may not be necessary for some virtual reality tasks.