MACBETH: Management of Avatar Conflict by Employment of a Technique Hybrid

When a virtual environment system prevents a user’s avatar hand from penetrating virtual objects, the seen and felt positions of the hand separate. We propose a new method for reducing this position discrepancy as quickly as possible without introducing perceptible discrepancy between the seen and felt motion of the user’s hand. We performed one user study to find users’ detection thresholds for discrepancy between the seen and felt velocities of their hands, which were necessary to implement our new method. We then performed another user study to compare this new method to two previous methods of dealing with position discrepancy. Our method showed statistically significant improvements in user-rated naturalness and user preference and showed no loss in user performance.