Above Surface Interaction for Multiscale Navigation in Mobile Virtual Reality
This addresses usability issues for VR users in confined spaces like airplanes or buses, though it is incremental as it builds on existing interaction methods.
The paper tackled the challenge of navigating large planar information spaces like maps in mobile VR within physically constrained environments, finding that an above-surface interaction technique significantly outperformed traditional 2D on-surface inputs in performance and user preference in a study with 20 participants.
Virtual Reality enables the exploration of large information spaces. In physically constrained spaces such as airplanes or buses, controller-based or mid-air interaction in mobile Virtual Reality can be challenging. Instead, the input space on and above touch-screen enabled devices such as smartphones or tablets could be employed for Virtual Reality interaction in those spaces. In this context, we compared an above surface interaction technique with traditional 2D on-surface input for navigating large planar information spaces such as maps in a controlled user study (n = 20). We find that our proposed above surface interaction technique results in significantly better performance and user preference compared to pinch-to-zoom and drag-to-pan when navigating planar information spaces.