The Great Potato Search: The Effects of Visual Context on Users' Feature Search and Recognition Abilities in an IVR Scene Interactive Poster

Figure 1. The four visual contexts, BLANK, BRICK, WORLD, and PORCH, displayed in our study of user search performance. The white objects in each context are examples of those displayed during the search task. Abstract We present a user study of the effects of visual context and interaction methods on visual search performance in an immersive virtual reality (IVR) system. Contrary to previous research on 2D visual search, our results suggest that visual context does not significantly contribute to a user's ability to find and identify features on an object in a scene. However, we did find that using a hand-held device to manipulate the object during search facilitated user performance more than simply walking around a static object.