Cuing Multiple-Targets for Visual Search in Virtual Reality
DOI: 10.1109/vrw66409.2025.00257
archive: archived pipeline: cataloged verified
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Summary
This study evaluates the efficacy of visual search cues in a 3D virtual reality (VR) environment, specifically comparing three cue designs—gaze line, 2D wedge, and 3D arrow—against a no-cue baseline. While prior research has extensively examined these cues in augmented reality (AR) and single-target contexts, this work addresses a gap by testing their performance in multi-target visual search tasks within VR. The primary motivation is to determine which cue design optimally balances search speed, accuracy, and user mental effort when users must locate multiple targets simultaneously among distractors. The researchers conducted a within-subjects experiment using a Meta Quest Pro headset and a Unity-based application. The virtual environment consisted of buildings with 70 potential search locations (windows and doorways), each encoded with a numeric value. Participants were tasked with finding 10 targets per trial amidst distractors. The study included 19 participants who completed 14 search configurations per condition, resulting in 56 trials total. The order of conditions was counterbalanced using Latin Squares. Performance metrics included search time, accuracy, and subjective mental effort, measured using the Paas scale. The results demonstrated that the gaze line cue was superior across all measured dimensions. It yielded the highest accuracy (99.07%) and the fastest average search time per target (2.23 seconds). Statistical analysis via repeated measures ANOVA confirmed significant differences in both accuracy ($p < 0.01$) and search time ($p < 0.001$). The 2D wedge was the second fastest (2.42s) but required significantly higher mental effort than the gaze line. The 3D arrow was slower (2.66s) and less accurate (97.5%) than the gaze line. The no-cue condition was the slowest (2.93s) and least accurate (94.06%). Regarding mental effort, the gaze line was rated as the least demanding (Paas score 3.42), while the 2D wedge and no-cue conditions were rated as more effortful. The findings suggest that the gaze line is the optimal cue for multi-target visual search in VR. The authors attribute this success to the cue’s intuitive design, which embeds both direction and location information without the perceptual ambiguity associated with 3D arrows or the confusion reported with 2D wedges. The study concludes that incorporating spatial information directly into the cue design reduces cognitive load and improves performance, offering practical implications for the design of AR and VR interfaces where efficient visual search is critical.
Provenance
The full processing record for this entry. Every stage of this paper's journey through the pipeline is logged — what ran, with which tool and model, how many attempts it took, and when it last completed. Discovered via openalex_abstract on 2026-05-08 (2 acquisition events logged).
| Stage | Outcome | Tool | Model | Prompt | Attempts | Completed |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| discover | success | author_sweep | — | — | 2 | 2026-05-28 |
| archive | success | canonical_url | — | — | 7 | 2026-06-09 |
| extract | success | cached | — | — | 2 | 2026-06-09 |
| clean | success | clean | — | — | 1 | 2026-06-04 |
| chunk | success | chunk | — | — | 1 | 2026-06-04 |
| embed | success | embed | Qwen/Qwen3-Embedding-8B | — | 1 | 2026-06-04 |
| enrich | success | openalex | — | — | 2 | 2026-05-08 |
| promote | success | — | — | — | 1 | 2026-05-07 |
| summarize | success | llm | qwen3.6-27b-prismaquant | summ-v5 | 1 | 2026-06-09 |
| tag | success | vector_similarity | — | — | 15 | 2026-06-11 |
| verify | success | — | — | — | 1 | 2026-06-09 |
Summary generated by qwen3.6-27b-prismaquant on 2026-06-09; verification: verified.
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