Feedback Mechanisms in Assisting the Performance of Virtual Ping-Pong Game

Incorporating eeective feedback mechanisms in an interactive game system can certainly enhance the user's performance of the tasks. This paper presents the modular design and evaluation of a Virtual Reality system, called the Virtual Ping-Pong System. Our system supports an interactive ping-pong game which is implemented on top of the VRML platform. The main objective of our system is to enhance the feedback eeect in user training and entertainment. Novice users always nd that the pace of Ping-Pong game is fast and diicult to handle, especially the perception of the 3D position of the moving ball. To address the problem, we incorporated additional Visual and Audio feedbacks in the system to assist users to achieve better performance. Several sets of experiments are carried out to evaluate the eeectiveness of neutral, visual, auditory and integrated feedback mechanisms. Our results show that audio feedback leads to better performance than other alternatives. Visual feedback produces more consistent performance, but its use did introduce a negative eeect on playing the virtual ping-pong game in our experiments.