Type of Publication: Article in Collected Edition

SaVR: Increasing Safety in Virtual Reality Environments via Electrical Muscle Stimulation

Author(s):

Faltaous, Sarah; Neuwirth, Joshua; Gruenefeld, Uwe; Schneegass, Stefan

Title of Anthology:

19th International Conference on Mobile and Ubiquitous Multimedia (MUM)

pages:

254-258

Publisher:

Association for Computing Machinery

Location(s):

Essen, Germany

Publication Date:

2020

ISBN:

9781450388702

Digital Object Identifier (DOI):

doi:10.1145/3428361.3428389

Citation:

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Abstract

One of the main benefits of interactive Virtual Reality (VR) applications is that they provide a high sense of immersion. As a result, users lose their sense of real-world space which makes them vulnerable to collisions with real-world objects. In this work, we propose a novel approach to prevent such collisions using Electrical Muscle Stimulation (EMS). EMS actively prevents the movement that would result in a collision by actuating the antagonist muscle. We report on a user study comparing our approach to the commonly used feedback modalities: audio, visual, and vibro-tactile. Our results show that EMS is a promising modality for restraining user movement and, at the same time, rated best in terms of user experience.