Scene-Level Assessment of Comfort, Legibility, and Spatial

Control in Virtual Reality Interfaces

Massila Kamalrudin1,* Mustafa Musa2

1 Faculty of Information and Communication Technology, Universiti Teknikal Malaysia Melaka, Malaysia

2 Center of Research and Innovation Management, Universiti Teknikal Malaysia Melaka, Malaysia

Received: January 02, 2026 Revised: February 07, 2026 Accepted: March 14, 2026 ⋆ Corresponding author

ABSTRACT

Virtual reality interface quality is not determined by visual appeal alone. A scene may look convincing while still

producing unstable gaze, uncomfortable depth switching, excessive head movement, or slow target selection. This

paper presents a scene-level assessment framework for measuring comfort, legibility, and spatial control in VR

interfaces. The work is deliberately organized as a design-science evaluation rather than as a conventional classifier

study: it begins with interface failure mechanisms, defines observable headset and scene variables, computes a Virtual

Reality Interface Comfort score, and then translates the results into review actions. The empirical analysis uses a

processed feature-level extract aligned with public VR eye-tracking task structures and combines gaze stability, pupil

variability, vergence error, head-turn demand, tracking loss, selection latency, contrast balance, target comfort, depth

pressure, and spatial-memory support. The results indicate that comfortable VR scenes are characterized by stable

fixation, consistent depth placement, strong spatial memory support, and modest interaction latency, while high-risk

scenes are mainly associated with head-turn demand, tracking loss, pupil variability, and depth pressure. The paper

contributes a transparent measurement model, a set of scene-pattern diagnostics, and a practical governance workflow

for deciding when a VR interface should be released, revised, or retested.

Keywords: Virtual reality Interface comfort Gaze stability Spatial usability Scene evaluation

1. INTRODUCTION

Virtual reality interfaces are often judged from the viewpoint

of immersion: whether the world looks convincing, whether

interaction feels natural, and whether the user experiences

presence. These criteria are important, but they are not sufficient

for interface evaluation. A VR scene can be graphically

rich while still requiring tiring head turns, rapid refixation,

unstable target search, or repeated accommodation and vergence

changes. The result is an interface that may appear

successful in a screenshot but becomes uncomfortable when

experienced through a headset.

This paper treats a VR interface as an embodied scene. In

such a scene, information is not only displayed; it is positioned

in depth, distributed around the body, approached

through gaze, and selected through movement. The user’s

eyes, head, and hands therefore become part of the interface

measurement problem. A flat-screen usability metric is not

enough because the same button size, contrast, or information

density can have different consequences when controls are

located in the periphery or placed at an uncomfortable depth.

The paper develops a scene-level assessment framework for

VR interface comfort, legibility, and spatial control. The proposed

score is not intended to replace user studies. Instead, it