Having spent hundreds of hours in VR doing development, gaming and research, and having used a plethora of control methods from EM trackers, kinects, analogs and mice, and used all kinds of VR headsets including each version of the Rift, the Vive and PSVR, I've come to a conclusion.
The Xbox controller is used to control a decent amount of VR games without full motion tracking. In games that involve bodily movement, the analogs are usually mapped to traditional 3D controls (left analog moves, right analog controls the look). While this works, it often causes motion sickness symptoms for many, which necessitates the usage of VR based movement/aiming schemes that are at 30/45/90 degree increments and with short teleports.
I've found that using M+KB actually alleviates this issue significantly. The mouse movement controls your look position instead of acceleration like the analog, so you can make fast movements akin to the discrete VR rotations. Similarly with the keyboard, your movement is velocity based instead of acceleration based so you don't get the windup-winddown cycle that seems to cause the most nausea. I've played through the entirety of Alien Isolation in the Rift with this control scheme and it was fine, but I can't play it with the analog.
We've also run experiments on both experienced VR users and casual/first time users using a factorial design to isolate different factors and the empirical results seem to suggest this as well. (We actually wrote a paper on it but ended up not publishing it because we thought other, unrelated aspects of the paper weren't strong enough).
So, PC VR users on GAF, have you also tried a MKB control scheme in VR and do you also feel this way is better?
The Xbox controller is used to control a decent amount of VR games without full motion tracking. In games that involve bodily movement, the analogs are usually mapped to traditional 3D controls (left analog moves, right analog controls the look). While this works, it often causes motion sickness symptoms for many, which necessitates the usage of VR based movement/aiming schemes that are at 30/45/90 degree increments and with short teleports.
I've found that using M+KB actually alleviates this issue significantly. The mouse movement controls your look position instead of acceleration like the analog, so you can make fast movements akin to the discrete VR rotations. Similarly with the keyboard, your movement is velocity based instead of acceleration based so you don't get the windup-winddown cycle that seems to cause the most nausea. I've played through the entirety of Alien Isolation in the Rift with this control scheme and it was fine, but I can't play it with the analog.
We've also run experiments on both experienced VR users and casual/first time users using a factorial design to isolate different factors and the empirical results seem to suggest this as well. (We actually wrote a paper on it but ended up not publishing it because we thought other, unrelated aspects of the paper weren't strong enough).
So, PC VR users on GAF, have you also tried a MKB control scheme in VR and do you also feel this way is better?
