Deplau: Movement and Interaction in Virtual Reality

Since appearing on the consumer market two years ago, Virtual Reality (VR) games for the HTC Vive have begun to standardize their control schemes. The conventional control schemes for VR games consists of either teleportation or artificial locomotion via the Vive trackpads as a method of movement. These methods are not physically taxing to the players, but teleportation breaks immersion while artificial locomotion can induce motion sickness. Gestures that mimic natural human movement can prevent breaking the user’s immersion and reduce motion sickness. Here, we have developed and released a commercial VR game using gestures that mimic natural human movement titled “Deplau” on Steam; a digital distribution platform. Deplau uses body movement, hand gestures and the included HTC Vive controllers for the users to move and interact in the virtual world. A set of gestures taking into consideration the movement of the human body are used as controls for the game. A total number of 30 users were selected, age between 10 to 20 years old as the target interest group. Through qualitative user evaluation on the target interest group during play testing, the majority of the users gave positive reception towards the movement and spell controls. For the overall game experience, all participants rated 4 and 5 out of 5 scores