This paper reports on an experiment in human subject balance and coordination using a HTC Vive head mounted display to create a virtual environment.  For the experiment, 30 male human subjects of college age and 30 female subjects of college age were asked to navigate along a clear path in a virtual world using a controller with their dominant hand and asked to balance a virtual ball on a virtual plate using the other controller in the non-dominant hand.  The test subjects moved along a clearly marked path, with three surprise obstacles occurring: a large rock landing near the path, and explosion near the path, and a flock of birds coming across the path.  Data included 6 degree of freedom trajectories for the head, and both hands, as well as data gathered by the computer system on ball location and velocity, plate location and velocity and ball status.  Likert scale questionnaires were answered by the test subjects relative to video game experience, sense of presence, and ease of managing the ball movement.  Statistics showed that the male students dropped the ball less frequently at p = 0.0254 and p = 0.0036.  In contrast, female students were aware of their performance with correlation levels of 0.632 and 0.588.


A Study of Human Balance and Coordination Using a Head Mounted Display

Division / Sponsors: 
Design Engineering Division and Computers & Information In Engineering Division


Paper Proceedings: https://asmedigitalcollection.asme.org/IDETC-CIE/IDETC-CIE2020/volume/83907

IDETC2020 - Virtual Conference

Supporting the need among researchers worldwide for additional online and multimedia content, ASME now offers the ASME Conference Video Collection. This platform will collect and provide long-term access to conference presentation videos, encompassing all technology areas within ASME's technical conference and events program. About 30,000-40,000 engineers across all mechanical engineering and related disciplines participate in ASME conferences each year. This includes authors of approximately 6,000 to 8,000 technical papers published by ASME, the majority of whom also submit video presentations for our virtual conferences. The video collection will be available as an add-on to existing product packages or as a separate subscription.