Virtual Smartphone: High Fidelity Interaction with Proxy Objects in Virtual Reality
This work addresses the challenge of improving user experience and interaction realism in VR applications, though it is incremental as it builds on existing proxy object concepts.
The paper tackled the problem of enhancing interaction fidelity in virtual reality by introducing proxy objects, specifically a virtual paper map and smartphone, which allowed for precise and intuitive user interactions, with participants demonstrating high precision and intuitiveness despite not seeing their hands in VR.
This workshop paper presents two proxy objects for high fidelity interaction in virtual reality (VR): a paper map and a smartphone. We showcase how our virtual paper map can increase interactivity and orientation, while our virtual smartphone extends the use of a proxy object, as it allows for actual touch input on a real phone leading to an almost infinite set of possible (inter-)actions (e.g. snapping pictures in the virtual world). Observations showed that participants were very precise in holding and interacting with both the paper map and the smartphone even though they did not see their hands in VR. The interaction in general was very intuitive which was mostly attributed to the realistic size of the virtual objects. Using our findings we discuss the trade off between adaptivity and high fidelity of proxy objects in VR.