Chuan-en Lin
Hong Kong University of Science and Technology, Hong Kong, China
Automatic generation of Virtual Reality (VR) worlds which adapt to physical environments have been proposed to enable safe walking in VR. However, such techniques mainly focus on the avoidance of physical objects as obstacles and overlook their interaction affordances as passive haptics. Current VR experiences involving interaction with physical objects in surroundings still require verbal instruction from an assisting partner. We present ARchitect, a proof-of-concept prototype that allows flexible customization of a VR experience with human-in-the-loop. ARchitect brings in an assistant to map physical objects to virtual proxies of matching affordances using Augmented Reality (AR). In a within-subjects study (9 user pairs) comparing ARchitect to a baseline condition, assistants and players experienced decreased workload and players showed increased VR presence and trust in the assistant. Finally, we defined design guidelines of ARchitect for future designers and implemented three demonstrative experiences.
https://doi.org/10.1145/3313831.3376614
The ACM CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems (https://chi2020.acm.org/)