Virtual hand-button interaction in a generic virtual reality flight simulator

Flight simulators with a physical mock-up are dependent on the aircraft type and have high costs. In order to overcome high cost issues, a generic virtual reality flight simulator is designed. Virtual buttons are used without a physical mock-up to make the virtual reality flight simulator independent of the aircraft type. The classic virtual hand metaphor is employed to interact with the virtual objects. This paper examines the virtual hand-button interaction in the generic virtual reality flight simulator where no haptic feed-back is provided. The effect of the collision volume of a virtual button during the virtual hand-button interaction is determined. It is concluded that a change in the collision volume within aircraft design limits, does not have a significant impact on the interaction. We also investigate different virtual hand avatars. We find that the accuracy of hand-button interaction depends on the hand avatar rather than the collision volume. Representing a smaller part of the hand avatar results in less efficient interaction. This shows the size and shape of hand avatars plays a major role in the virtual reality simulator design. This finding contributes to the various virtual reality applications which exploit the virtual hand metaphor.

1. Introduction

Virtual reality flight simulators are created for various pur-poses, such as pilot training and virtual prototyping. To reduce costs, these flight simulators are required to be adaptable to different types of aircraft. Interaction with purely virtual objects is needed for adaptability. However, this reduces the naturalness of the interaction since there is no sense of touch and no force feed-back. Therefore, simple tasks, such as switching a virtual button on/off or pushing a virtual slider on a cockpit panel can be challenging.