Effect of Artificial Haptic Characteristics on Virtual Reality Performance.

In recent years, virtual reality (VR) systems, mainly applied to computer games, have become easily available and widely used by young people. Multipurpose haptic devices for the virtual environment, such as the SPIDAR system, have been developed for everyday training tasks. Therefore, the wide range of use contexts and user requirements should be considered to effectively design and evaluate the systems. However, the measurement of objective quality of VR systems from the user’s experience has not been widely considered, although some questionnaires for evaluating the user’s experience based on the sense of embodiment have been proposed. We investigate the measures relating to the user performance, especially with regard to the sense of embodiment. We find that the duration observed between an event and the root-mean-square electromyogram amplitude dropping to a local minimum, within two seconds, could be a measure for evaluating the quality of VR systems from the point of view of user performance.