Increasing the effective egocentric field of view with proprioceptive and tactile feedback

Multimodality often exhibits synergistic effects: each modality compliments and compensates for other modalities in transferring coherent, unambiguous, and enriched information for higher interaction efficiency and improved sense of presence. In this paper, we explore one such phenomenon: a positive interaction among the geometric field of view, proprioceptive interaction, and tactile feedback. We hypothesize that, with proprioceptive interaction and tactile feedback, the geometric field of view and thus visibility can be increased such that it is larger than the physical field of view, without causing a significant distortion in the user's distance perception. This, in turn, would further help operation of the overall multimodal interaction scheme as the user is more likely to receive the multimodal feedback simultaneously. We tested our hypothesis with an experiment to measure the user's change in distance perception according to different values of egocentric geometric field of view and feedback conditions. Our experimental results have shown that, when coupled with physical interaction, the GFOV could be increased by up to 170 percent of the physical field of view without introducing significant distortion in distance perception. Second, when tactile feedback was introduced, in addition to visual and proprioceptive cues, the GFOV could be increased by up to 200 percent. The results offer a useful guideline for effectively utilizing of modality compensation and building multimodal interfaces for close range spatial tasks in virtual environments. In addition, it demonstrates one way to overcome the shortcomings of the narrow (physical) fields of views of most contemporary HMDs.