A Unified Multi-touch Gesture based Approach for Efficient Short-, Medium-, and Long-Distance Travel in VR

Yan, Zhixin

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A Unified Multi-touch Gesture based Approach for Efficient Short-, Medium-, and Long-Distance Travel in VR

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As one of the main topics in Virtual Reality (VR), travel interfaces have been studied by many researchers in the past decades. However, it is still a challenging topic today. One of the design problems is the tradeoff between speed and precision. Some tasks (e.g., driving) require a user to travel long distances with less concern about precise movement, while other tasks (e.g., walking) require users to approach nearby objects in a more precise way, and to care less about the speed. Between these two extremes there are scenarios when both speed and precision become equally important. In the real world, we often seamlessly balance these requirements. However, most VR systems only support a single travel mode, which may be good for one range of travel, but not others. We propose and evaluate a new VR travel framework which supports three separate multi-touch travel techniques for different distance ranges, that all use the same input device with a unifying metaphor of the user’s fingers becoming their legs. We investigate the usability and user acceptance for the fingers-as-legs metaphor, as well as the efficiency, naturalness, and impact on spatial awareness such an interface has.

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