vMirror: Enhancing the Interaction with Occluded or Distant Objects in VR with Virtual Mirrors

Abstract

Interacting with out of reach or occluded VR objects can be cumbersome. Although users can change their position and orientation, such as via teleporting, to help observe and select, doing so frequently may cause loss of spatial orientation or motion sickness. We present vMirror, an interactive widget leveraging reflection of mirrors to observe and select distant or occluded objects. We first designed interaction techniques for placing mirrors and interacting with objects through mirrors. We then conducted a formative study to explore a semi-automated mirror placement method with manual adjustments. Next, we conducted a target-selection experiment to measure the effect of the mirror's orientation on users' performance. Results showed that vMirror can be as efficient as direct target selection for most mirror orientations. We further compared vMirror with teleport technique in a virtual treasure hunt game and measured participants’ task performance and subjective experiences. Finally, we discuss vMirorr user experience and present future directions.

Authors
Nianlong Li
Institute of Software, Chinese Academy of Sciences, Beijing, China
Zhengquan Zhang
Xi'an Jiaotong University, Xi'an, China
Can Liu
City University of Hong Kong, Kowloon, Hong Kong
Zengyao Yang
Xi'an Jiaotong University, Xi'an, China
Yinan Fu
Xiamen University, Xiamen, China
Feng Tian
Institute of software, Chinese Academy of Sciences, Beijing, China
Teng Han
Institute of Software, Chinese Academy of Sciences, Beijing, China
Mingming Fan
Rochester Institute of Technology, Rochester, New York, United States
DOI

10.1145/3411764.3445537

Paper URL

https://doi.org/10.1145/3411764.3445537

Video

Conference: CHI 2021

The ACM CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems (https://chi2021.acm.org/)

Session: AR and VR

[A] Paper Room 10, 2021-05-13 17:00:00~2021-05-13 19:00:00 / [B] Paper Room 10, 2021-05-14 01:00:00~2021-05-14 03:00:00 / [C] Paper Room 10, 2021-05-14 09:00:00~2021-05-14 11:00:00
Paper Room 10
13 items in this session
2021-05-13 08:00:00
2021-05-13 10:00:00
Japanese summary
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