The effects of touchless interaction on usability and sense of presence in a virtual environment

For software applications with a significant level of user involvement, the traditional concept of usability has evolved into the more complex idea of user experience, which also covers emotional, cognitive or physical responses. In virtual reality, user experience also depends on the user perception related to some peculiarities of immersive environments, where also the devices employed for user interaction play a determinant role. This has led to the design of the Presence Questionnaire (PQ) for the evaluation of the effectiveness of virtual environments. This work analyzes the effects of two different interaction modalities on usability and sense of presence: in particular, the Myo armband, a gesture-based device for touchless interaction, is compared with the Vive handheld controller bundled with the HTC Vive headset. A total of 84 subjects were recruited to test the virtual environment and asked them to fill in a questionnaire obtained by combining the Usability Metric for User eXperience (UMUX) questionnaire, the System Usability Scale (SUS) and the presence questionnaire (PQ), which was specifically designed for virtual environments. A comparison between the scores obtained for the two interaction modalities revealed which questionnaire items are significantly influenced by the input interface and deduce some insights about the consequences on human factors.