Lateral Head Tracking in Desktop Virtual Reality

Head coupled perspective is often considered to be an essential aspect of stereoscopic desktop virtual reality (VR) systems. Such systems use a tracking device to determine the user’s head pose in up to six degrees of freedom (DOF). Users of desktop VR systems perform their task while sitting down and therefore the extent of head movements is limited. This paper investigates the validity of using a head tracking system for desktop VR that only tracks lateral head movement. Users performed a depth estimation task under full (six DOF) head tracking, lateral head tracking, and disabled head tracking. Furthermore, we considered stereoscopic and monoscopic viewing. Our results show that user performance was not significantly affected when incorporating only lateral head motion. Both lateral and full head tracking performed better than the disabled head tracking case.