Comparative Evaluation of Digital Writing and Art in Real and Immersive Virtual Environments

Virtual reality (VR) experiences currently tend to focus on full body interactions. However, fine motor control in actions such as writing and drawing are seldom studied. Challenges include the inability to perceive fine details due to the low resolution of head mounted displays, the difficulty in simulating fine motor actions in virtual environments, tracking instabilities, latency issues, etc. State of the art VR has managed to address a host of such concerns, supporting a variety of input mechanisms for activities such as writing, sketching, immersive modeling, etc. With VR increasingly being applied in education and medical contexts where writing and note taking is a crucial, it is important to study how well humans can perform these tasks in VR. In a between-subjects empirical evaluation, we studied participants' fine motor coordination with several digital input based writing and artistic tasks performed both in virtual and real world settings, further examining the effects of providing a virtual self avatar on task performance. We integrated multiple tracking systems and applied inverse kinematics to animate the virtual body and simulate hand motions. We went on to compare how different the outputs of these digital input metaphors are to a real world pen and paper approach in an effort to ascertain where we currently stand in being able to support writing and note taking in virtual world contexts. Overall, it seems to be the case that while writing and artistic activities can be successfully supported in VR applications using specialized input devices, the accuracy with which users perform such tasks is significantly higher in the real world, highlighting the need for developments that support such fine motor tasks in VR.