Data_Sheet_1_Context matters during pick-and-place in VR: Impact on search and transport phases.pdf

When considering external assistive systems for people with motor impairments, gaze has been shown to be a powerful tool as it is anticipatory to motor actions and is promising for understanding intentions of an individual even before the action. Up until now, the vast majority of studies investigating the coordinated eye and hand movement in a grasping task focused on single objects manipulation without placing them in a meaningful scene. Very little is known about the impact of the scene context on how we manipulate objects in an interactive task. In the present study, it was investigated how the scene context affects human object manipulation in a pick-and-place task in a realistic scenario implemented in VR. During the experiment, participants were instructed to find the target object in a room, pick it up, and transport it to a predefined final location. Thereafter, the impact of the scene context on different stages of the task was examined using head and hand movement, as well as eye tracking. As the main result, the scene context had a significant effect on the search and transport phases, but not on the reach phase of the task. The present work provides insights into the development of potential supporting intention predicting systems, revealing the dynamics of the pick-and-place task behavior once it is realized in a realistic context-rich scenario.</p

Augmentation Impacts Strategy and Gaze Distribution in a Dual-Task Interleaving Scenario

When interleaving multiple tasks, people are confronted with a decision of how to distribute a finite amount of time between several tasks, which defines the task-interleaving strategy. In some challenging task interleaving scenarios where accurate timing is essential, people perform worse than they could have. With the growing advancement of technology, such as augmented reality, it became possible to impact people’s strategy and improve their performance. However, when augmenting visual input with additional visual content, the augmentation not only introduces the possible benefit but can also capture attentional resources. It is, thus, important to investigate how visual augmentation affects people’s performance in cases when otherwise people underscore in their performance. In the current study, using a psychophysics approach, it was investigated how visual augmentation impacts the task-interleaving strategy and, thus, performance in a dual-task setting with unequal task importance. In a simple dynamic 3D environment, four visual augmentations were generated aiming to prompt the user when it is more beneficial score-wise to switch from one task to another. The mean duration on one task before the task switch, as well as the resulting total performance, were evaluated in combination with the gaze direction distribution. In terms of the strategy and the total performance, all augmentations showed an advantage compared to when augmentation was not present. Furthermore, an abrupt augmentation onset based on the individual response time of the participant was more beneficial score-wise for the strategy compared to a constantly present visual augmentation. However, it affected the natural gaze direction distribution indicating the allocation of attentional resources to the augmentation. The results of this study provide an insight into potential visual augmentation designs aiming to improve user’s performance in a challenging dual-task interleaving setting.</p