Multimodal Menu Presentation and Selection in Immersive Virtual Environments

Usability has become one of the key ingredients in making virtual reality (VR) systems work, and a big part of a usable VR system is in the design of effective interface/interaction schemes. During the past few years, several empirical studies have been conducted to evaluate the usability of generic interaction techniques in the context of virtual environment design. As a continued effort in this line of research, we investigate in the usability of various menu presentation and multimodal selection schemes in immersive virtual environments. It is often required to make commands in a virtual environment, and when there are many number of available commands with a complex structure, a hierarchical menu has been one of the most popular choices. While the task of menu selection may be viewed as a composite task of manipulation and selection, and therefore, we can certainly build on the prior research in generic interaction tasks, there are also enough idiosyncrasies that warrant a more in depth look as a generic task of its own. We have identified 5 major menu display and 13 possible menu selection methods; among them we have finished the usability testing for the first two (tracking/button and gesture/gesture) interaction methods (across the 5 display methods). In this paper, we explain how we came up with the classification, how we set up and ran the usability testing, and report on the results we have obtained from testing the two interaction methods.