How Vibrotactile and Auditory Feedback Can Affect Performance in Search for Invisible Objects in Virtual Reality

Virtual Reality (VR) studies tend to focus on visual aspects, yet auditory as well as tactile aspects should also be considered. Setting out to examine how an invisible object search can benefit from auditory and tactile cues, a VR game was developed to accomplish this. The game had three levels that differed on task difficulty, level one having a static invisible target, level two with a moving invisible target and level three with two moving invisible objects. Forty-two participants played this VR game, experiencing vibrotactile cues, auditory cues and a combination of both in the three levels. The participants did two playthroughs of the game. The results point towards the combination of both types of cues being the best of the different cue condition, while task difficulty overall had the biggest effects on performance.