Impact of hand-assisted viewing on user performance and learning patterns in virtual environments

The ability to locate, select and interact with objects is fundamental to most Virtual Reality (VR) applications. Recently, it was demonstrated that the virtual hand metaphor, a technique commonly used for these tasks, can also be employed to control the virtual camera, resulting in improved performance and user evaluation in visual search tasks. In this work, we further investigate the effects of hand-assisted viewing on user behavior in immersive virtual environments. We demonstrate that hand-assisted camera control significantly changes the way how people operate their virtual hands, on motor, cognitive, and behavioral levels. © 2010 Springer-Verlag.