Tunnels vs. Wires: A Comparative Analysis of Two 3D Steering Tasks in Virtual Environments
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Steering involves continuous movement along constrained paths, well-studied in 2D. The extensions to 3D using the Ring-and-Wire and Ball-and-Tunnel tasks were often treated as interchangeable in previous work. In this paper, we directly compare these two tasks through a within-subjects user study (n = 18) with varying 3D path orientations. The results show that Ring-and-Wire significantly outperformed Ball-and-Tunnel, with 17.17% lower task time, 21.65% higher throughput, and 21.52% faster average speed. Participants also preferred Ring-and-Wire and reported lower workload. Visual ambiguity, especially near the tunnel’s rear surface, complicated spatial perception in the Ball-and-Tunnel task. We thus recommend that future studies choose 3D steering tasks carefully for experiments, as the two tasks are not interchangeable.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.002 | 0.014 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.002 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.002 | 0.002 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.004 | 0.001 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".