Empirical Comparison of Human Behavior and Performance with Different Display Devices for Virtual Environments

Although a wide range of display devices is used in virtual environment (VE) systems, no guidelines exist to choose an appropriate display for a particular VE application. Our goal in this research is to develop such guidelines on the basis of empirical results. In this paper, we present a preliminary experiment comparing human behavior and performance between a head-mounted display (HMD) and a four-sided spatially immersive display (SID). In particular, we studied users’ preferences for real vs. virtual turns in the VE. The results indicate that subjects have a significant preference for real turns in the HMD and for virtual turns in the SID. The experiment also found that females are more likely to choose real turns than males. We suggest that HMDs are an appropriate choice when users perform frequent turns and require spatial orientation.