SwiVRChair: A Motorized Swivel Chair to Nudge Users’ Orientation for 360 Degree Storytelling in Virtual Reality

We present SwiVRChair, a motorized swivel chair to nudge users‘ orientation in 360 degree storytelling scenarios. Since rotating a scene in virtual reality (VR) leads to simulator sickness, storytellers currently have no way of controlling users‘ attention. SwiVRChair allows creators of 360 degree VR movie content to be able to rotate or block users‘ movement to either show certain content or prevent users from seeing something. To enable this functionality, we modified a regular swivel chair using a 24V DC motor and an electromagnetic clutch. We developed two demo scenarios using both mechanisms (rotate and block) for the Samsung GearVR and conducted a user study (n=16) evaluating the presence, enjoyment and simulator sickness for participants using SwiVRChair compared to self control (Foot Control). Users rated the experience using SwiVRChair to be significantly more immersive and enjoyable whilst having a decrease in simulator sickness.

Project Video

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Publications

Jan Gugenheimer, Dennis Wolf, Gabriel Haas, Sebastian Krebs, and Enrico Rukzio. 2016. SwiVRChair: A Motorized Swivel Chair to Nudge Users‘ Orientation for 360 Degree Storytelling in Virtual Reality. In Proceedings of the 2016 CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems (CHI ’16). ACM, New York, NY, USA, 1996-2000. DOI: https://doi.org/10.1145/2858036.2858040

Jan Gugenheimer, Dennis Wolf, Gabriel Haas, Sebastian Krebs, and Enrico Rukzio. 2016. A demonstration of SwiVRChair: a motorized swivel chair to nudge users‘ orientation for 360 degree storytelling in virtual reality. In Proceedings of the 2016 ACM International Joint Conference on Pervasive and Ubiquitous Computing: Adjunct (UbiComp ’16). ACM, New York, NY, USA, 281-284. DOI: https://doi.org/10.1145/2968219.2971363