Towards Reproducible Evaluations for Flying Drone Controllers in Virtual Environments

Research attention on natural user interfaces (NUIs) for drone flights are rising. Nevertheless, NUIs are highly diversified, and primarily evaluated by different physical environments leading to hard-to-compare performance between such solutions. We propose a virtual environment, namely VRFlightSim, enabling comparative evaluations with enriched drone flight details to address this issue. We first replicated a state-of-the-art (SOTA) interface and designed two tasks (crossing and pointing) in our virtual environment. Then, two user studies with 13 participants demonstrate the necessity of VRFlightSim and further highlight the potential of open-data interface designs.

Authors

• Zheng Li
• Yiming Huang 0007
• Yui-Pan Yau
• Pan Hui 0001
• Lik-Hang Lee

Keywords

• Virtual environments
• User interfaces
• Task analysis
• Intelligent robots
• Drones
• Virtually
• Drone Control
• Natural Interface
• Type Control
• Completion Time
• Task Difficulty
• Velocity Distribution
• Physical World
• Real-life Experiences
• Modest Levels
• Interaction Design
• Testing Ground
• Flight Control
• Input Method
• Kind Of Control
• Trajectory Patterns
• Task Completion Time
• Path Generation
• Difficulty Index
• Eristalis
• Unreal Engine
• Research Prototype
• Human-Drone Interaction
• Methodologies
• The Fitts's Law
• Metaverse