Author: Graham Wilson

We are very happy to have a full paper accepted to ACM CHI 2024 in Hawai’i, on using translational gain and attenuation in VR to comfortably manipulate the perceived speed of a moving car [1]. A pre-print is available here.

Using our PassengXR motion platform, we conveyed the car’s movement to a VR headset and either increased (1.5x-9.5x) or decreased (0.66x to 0.14x) the virtual speed 1) through a cityscape during a reading/productivity task and 2) through a space station trench during a spaceship shooting game. We investigated how well passengers can detect the manipulation in speed, how it affected motion sickness, and whether it altered the perceived speed or distance of car journey.

@inproceedings{CHI24Ludicrous,
author = {Pohlmann, Katharina Margareta Teresa and Wilson, Graham and Li, Gang and Mcgill, Mark and Brewster, Stephen Anthony},
title = {From Slow-Mo to Ludicrous Speed: Comfortably Manipulating
the Perception of Linear In-Car VR Motion Through Vehicular
Translational Gain and Attenuation},
year = {2024},
publisher = {Association for Computing Machinery},
address = {New York, NY, USA},
booktitle = {Proceedings of the 2024 CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems},
articleno = {232},
numpages = {19},
location = {, Hawai'i, USA, },
series = {CHI '24}
}

Led by Mark McGill, the Viajero project has produced an open-source and off-the-shelf hardware and software motion platform for creating vehicular XR experiences: PassengXR.

Published at ACM UIST 2022 [1], the motion platform uses ESP32 Arduino sensors to detect the orientation (IMU), velocity (OBD-II) and location (GNSS) of the vehicle and wirelessly broadcast these to a Unity software platform running on standalone XR headsets. This allows practitioners to create passenger XR experiences that make use of, or counteract, the motion of the vehicle.

PassengXR supports multiple concurrent users in both individual and shared experiences and includes a number of ways to correct the alignment of vehicle and headset IMUs, which are inherently prone to drifting when in-motion. All code for the motion platform will be made available through GitHub, and more information can be found on the Motion Platform page and in the UIST paper [1].

[1] M. McGill, G. Wilson, D. Medeiros, and S. Brewster, “Passengxr: a low cost platform for any-car, multi-user, motion-based passenger xr experiences,” in Uist ’22: proceedings of the 35th annual acm symposium on user interface software and technology, , 2022.
[Bibtex]

@incollection{passengxr2022,
title={PassengXR: A Low Cost Platform for Any-Car, Multi-User, Motion-Based Passenger XR Experiences},
author={McGill, Mark and Wilson, Graham and Medeiros, Daniel and Brewster, Stephen},
booktitle={UIST '22: Proceedings of the 35th Annual ACM Symposium on User Interface Software and Technology},
year={2022}
}