We introduce OVRlap, a VR interaction technique that lets the user perceive multiple places simultaneously from a first-person perspective. OVRlap achieves this by overlapping viewpoints. At any time, only one viewpoint is active, meaning that the user may interact with objects therein. Objects seen from the active viewpoint are opaque, whereas objects seen from passive viewpoints are transparent. This allows users to perceive multiple locations at once and easily switch to the one in which they want to interact. We compare OVRlap and a single-viewpoint technique in a study where 20 participants complete object-collection and monitoring tasks. We find that participants are significantly faster and move their head significantly less with OVRlap in both tasks. We propose how the technique might be improved through automated switching of the active viewpoint and intelligent viewpoint rendering.
https://dl.acm.org/doi/abs/10.1145/3491102.3501873
The ACM CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems (https://chi2022.acm.org/)