Evaluating Hand-tracking Interaction for Performing Motor-tasks in VR Learning Environments

The past few years has witnessed a promising surge in immersive media technologies, however, a widespread adoption is still some years away. Recently, virtual reality (VR) head-mounted displays with inside-out tracking and hand-tracking are becoming popular in various fields. Representing users' hands and fingers in VR is crucial for many tasks. This is because hand-tracking enables a more natural, direct, interaction with a virtual environment (VE) which, compared to traditional handheld controllers, improves the VR immersive experience. This paper investigates user-perceived quality of experience for a reach-pick-place task inside VR. It presents a performance assessment methodology based on in-game analytics to evaluate user experience for different VR interaction types. We ran a controlled experiment (N=33) comparing two commodities: controller vs. hand-tracking. Results indicate a significant difference between the two data sets. The performance analytics show lower play-durations and trigger frequencies for the handheld controller compared to hand-tracking. The perceived mental workload for the tasks was also evaluated using Rated Scale Mental Effort (RSME). The reported scores were higher when using hand-tracking. The results help our understanding of the two interaction modalities in terms of their viability for naturalistic experiences akin to real-world scenarios.