Social virtual reality (VR) has enormous potential to allow several physically separated users to collaborate in an immersive virtual environment (IVE). These users and their actions are represented by avatars in the IVE. In question is how the appearance of those avatars influences communication and interaction. It might make a difference, if the avatar consists of a complete body representation or if only certain body parts are visible. Moreover, a one-to-one mapping of the user's movements to the avatar's movements might have advantages compared to pre-defined avatar animations. To answer these questions, we compared three different types of avatar appearances in a user study. For this, we used estimations of presence, social presence, and cognitive load. The evaluation showed that motion-controlled avatars with full representation of the avatar body lead to an increased sense of presence. Motion-controlled avatars as well as avatars which have only head and hands visible produced an increased feeling of co-presence and behavioral interdependence. This is interesting, since it states that we do not need a complete avatar body in social VR.
We present our metaphor for object translation, rotation, and rescaling and particle parameter manipulation in an augmented reality environment using an Android smartphone or tablet for the 2017 3DUI Competition in Los Angeles, California. Our metaphor aims to map the three-dimensional interaction of objects in a real world space to the two-dimensional plane of a smartphone or tablet screen. Our final product is the result of experimentation with different metaphors for translation, rotation, rescaling, and particle parameter manipulation and was guided by the feedback of voluntary product testers. The result is an interaction technique between a mobile device and the virtual world which we believe to be intuitive.
Spatial Augmented Reality (SAR) allows a user, or a group of users, to benefit from digital augmentations embedded directly into the physical world. This enables co-located information and unobstructed interaction. On the other hand, SAR suffers from limitations that are inherently linked to its physical dependency, which is not the case for see-through or immersive displays. In this work, we explore how to facilitate the transition from SAR to VR, and vice versa, integrating both into a unified experience. We developed a set of interaction techniques and obtained first feedback from informal interviews.
A 3D User Interface for manipulating virtual objects in Augmented Reality scenarios on handheld devices is presented. The proposed solution takes advantage of two interaction techniques. The former (named “cursor mode”) exploits a cursor, which position and movement are bound to the view of the device; the cursor allows the user to select objects and to perform coarse-grain manipulations by moving the device. The latter (referred to as “tuning mode”) uses the physical affordances of a tangible interface to provide the user with the possibility to refine objects in all their aspects (position, rotation, scale, color, and so forth) with a fine-grained control.
How does the virtual representation of the user's hands influence the performance on a button selection task performed in a tablet-based interaction within an immersive virtual environment? To answer this question, we asked 55 participants to use three conditions: no-hand avatar, realistic avatar and translucent avatar. The participants were faster but made slightly more errors while using the no-avatar condition, and considered easier to perform the task with the translucent avatar.
3D interaction in virtual reality often requires to manipulate and feel virtual objects with our fingers. Although existing haptic interfaces can be used for this purpose (e.g. force-feedback exoskeleton gloves), they are still bulky and expensive. In this paper, we introduce a novel multi-finger device called "FlexiFingers" that constrains each digit individually and produces elastic force-feedback. FlexiFingers leverages passive haptics in order to offer a lightweight, modular, and affordable alternative to active devices. Moreover, we combine Flexifingers with a pseudo-haptic approach that simulates different levels of stiffness when interacting with virtual objects. We illustrate how this combination of passive haptics and pseudo-haptics can benefit multi-finger interaction through several use cases related to music learning and medical training. Those examples suggest that our approach could find applications in various domains that require an accessible and portable way of providing haptic feedback to the fingers.
Scene visibility—the information of which parts of the scene are visible from a certain location—can be used to derive various properties of a virtual environment. For example, it enables the computation of viewpoint quality to determine the informativeness of a viewpoint, helps in constructing virtual tours, and allows to keep track of the objects a user may already have seen. However, computing visibility at runtime may be too computationally expensive for many applications, while sampling the entire scene beforehand introduces a costly precomputation step and may include many samples not needed later on. Therefore, in this paper, we propose a novel approach to precompute visibility information based on navigation meshes, a polygonal representation of a scene's navigable areas. We show that with only limited precomputation, high accuracy can be achieved in these areas. Furthermore, we demonstrate the usefulness of the approach by means of several applications, including viewpoint quality computation, landmark and room detection, and exploration assistance. In addition, we present a travel interface based on common visibility that we found to result in less cybersickness in a user study.
We propose an approach to greatly increase the tracking workspace of VR applications without adding new sensors. Our approach relies on controlled cameras able to follow the tracked markers all around the VR workspace providing 6DoF tracking data. We designed the proof-of-concept of such approach based on two consumer-grade cameras and a pan-tilt head. The resulting tracking workspace could be greatly increased depending on the actuators' range of motion. The accuracy error and jitter were found to be rather limited during camera motion (resp. 0.3cm and 0.02cm). Therefore, whenever the final VR application does not require a perfect tracking accuracy over the entire workspace, we recommend using our approach in order to enlarge the tracking workspace.
Traditionally, the field of Human Computer Interaction (HCI) was primarily concerned with designing and investigating interfaces between humans and machines. However, with recent technological advances, the concepts of "enhancing", "augmenting" or even "re-designing" humans themselves are becoming feasible and serious topics of scientific research as well as engineering development."Augmented Human" is a term that I use to refer to this overall research direction. Augmented Human introduces a fundamental paradigm shift in HCI: from human-computer-interaction to human-computer-integration, and out abilities will be mutually connected through the networks (what we call IoA, or Internet of Abilities, as the next step of IoT: Internet of Things). In this talk, I will discuss rich possibilities and distinct challenges in enhancing human abilities. I will introduce our recent projects including design of flying cameras as our remote and external eyes, a home appliance that can increase your happiness, an organic physical wall/window that dynamically mediates the environment, and an immersive human-human connection concept called "JackIn."
Advances in motion tracking technology, especially for commodity hardware, still require robust 3D gesture recognition in order to fully exploit the benefits of natural user interfaces. In this paper, we introduce a novel 3D gesture recognition algorithm based on the sparse representation of 3D human motion. The sparse representation of human motion provides a set of features that can be used to efficiently classify gestures in real-time. Compared to existing gesture recognition systems, sparse representation, the proposed approach enables full spatial and rotation invariance and provides high tolerance to noise. Moreover, the proposed classification scheme takes into account the inter-user variability which increases gesture classification accuracy in user-independent scenarios. We validated our approach with existing motion databases for gestural interaction and performed a user evaluation with naive subjects to show its robustness to arbitrarily defined gestures. The results showed that our classification scheme has high classification accuracy for user-independent scenarios even with users who have different handedness. We believe that sparse representation of human motion will pave the way for a new generation of 3D gesture recognition systems in order to fully open the potential of natural user interfaces.
This paper explores whether witnessing a Virtual Human (VH) in what appears to be a socially engaging discussion with another virtual human confederate/accomplice (VHC) can prime a person to feel and behave more socially engaged with the VH in a subsequent interaction. To explore this social priming phenomenon, we conducted an experiment in which participants in a control group had no priming while those in an experimental group were briefly exposed to an engaging social interaction between a VH and a nearby VHC. The participants primed by exposure to the brief VHC-VH interaction reported being significantly more excited and alert, perceiving the VH closer, and showed significantly higher measures of Co-Presence, Attentional Allocation, and Message Understanding dimensions of social presence towards the VH, compared to those who were not primed.
We propose a novel virtual reality entertainment system using a car as a motion platform. Motion platforms present a sensation of motion to the user using powerful actuators. Combined with virtual reality content, including surrounding visual, auditory and tactile displays, such systems can provide and immersive experience. However, the space and cost requirements for installation of motion platforms are large. To overcome this issue, we propose to use a car as a motion platform. We developed a prototype system composed of a head mounted display, a one-person electric car and an automatic driving algorithm. We developed and tested immersive content in which users ride on a trolley in a virtual space. All users responded quite positively to the experience.
Space available for any virtual reality experience is often strictly limited and abridges the virtual world to a size of a room. To extend the amount of virtual space accessible by walking within the same real workspace the methods of spatial compression were proposed. Scene manipulation with a controlled spatial overlap has been shown to be an efficient method. However, in order to apply space compression effectively for a dynamic, scalable and robust 3D user interface, it is important to study how the human perceives different layouts with overlapping spaces. In this paper, we explore the influence of the properties of the layout used on human spatial perception in a physically impossible spatial arrangement. Our first reported study focuses on the following parameters of the path within a simple self-overlapping layout: number of turns, relative door positions, sequences of counter- and clockwise turns, symmetry and asymmetry of the path used. In addition, in the second study we explore the effect of path smoothing by substituting the right-angled corridors by smooth curves. Our studies show that usage of the smooth curved corridors is more beneficial for spatial compression than the conventional right-angled approach.
We propose an indirect touch 3D interface using a two-sided handheld touch device for interactions with dense datasets on stereoscopic displays. Smartphones have been explored for virtual reality (VR) interaction with their touch and additional sensing capabilities. These capabilities are expanding, and this work explores the possibilities for a smartphone able to sense touch on both sides. To simulate this, two android mobile phones are combined back-to-back. The top touch surface is used for primary or fine interactions (selection/translation/rotation) and the bottom touch surface controls secondary or coarser aspects such as mode control or feature extraction. The two surfaces are programmed to recognize input from a total of 4 digits - two top and two bottom. The four touch areas enable 3D object selection, manipulation, and feature extraction using combinations of simultaneous touches. The users need not perform more complex gesture sequences or shift their focus to the handheld to pick a menu item (for example), unlike typical single-sided approaches.
In this work we present a study about usability experience of users in a cyber-archeological environment. We researched how they explore a realistic 3D environment in Virtual Reality (VR) through archaeometry conventional techniques. Our objective is to evaluate users experiences with interactive archaeometry tools with archaeologist (not a VR expert) and compare results with VR experts (not an archeology expert). Two hypothesis will be tested: a) it's possible to simulate the virtual world realistically as the real one?; b) if this VR model is passive of exploration, is it possible to create 3DUI analytical tools to help archaeologist to manipulate archaeometry tools? To explore these hypotheses we conducted experimental tests with ten users and the results are promising.
Handheld Augmented Reality commonly implements some variant of magic lens rendering, which turns only a fraction of the user's real environment into AR while the rest of the environment remains unaffected. Since handheld AR devices are commonly equipped with video see-through capabilities, AR magic lens applications often suffer from spatial distortions, because the AR environment is presented from the perspective of the camera of the mobile device. Recent approaches counteract this distortion based on estimations of the user's head position, rendering the scene from the user's perspective. To this end, approaches usually apply face-tracking algorithms on the front camera of the mobile device. However, this demands high computational resources and therefore commonly affects the performance of the application beyond the already high computational load of AR applications. In this paper, we present a method to reduce the computational demands for user perspective rendering by applying lightweight optical flow tracking and an estimation of the user's motion before head tracking is started. We demonstrate the suitability of our approach for computationally limited mobile devices and we compare it to device perspective rendering, to head tracked user perspective rendering, as well as to fixed point of view user perspective rendering.
This study presents a comparison of the influence of different VR environments in the task of selecting a preferred seat in an opera theater. We used gaze-based raycasting and headsets in a low-cost head-mounted display (HMD) (GearVR); and a virtual wand, head tracking, and headsets in a CAVE, two somewhat opposing technologies in the spectrum of current VR systems. Visual rendering and the selection technique depend on the capabilities of each environment, whereas the sound is approximated in both environments. Results show that subjects can select similar seats but their decisions differ between both environments. The results obtained can be useful in guiding the development of future VR applications.
Redirected walking with advanced planners such as MPCRed or FORCE requires both knowledge about the virtual environment mostly in the form of a skeleton graph representing the virtual environment - and a robust prediction of the user's actions. This paper presents methods for both parts and evaluates them with a number of test cases.Since frame rate is crucial for a virtual reality application, the computationally heavy extraction and preprocessing of the skeleton graph is done offline while only parts directly linked to the user's behavior such as the prediction are done online. The prediction is done using a target-based long-term prediction and the targets are determined automatically and combined with targets predefined by the designer of the virtual environment.The methods presented here provide a graph that is well suited for planning redirection and allows prediction techniques previously only demonstrated in studies to be applied to large scale virtual environments.
The VizSpace is a physically situated interactive system that combines touch and hand interactions behind the screen to create the effect that users are reaching inside and interacting in a 3D virtual workspace. It extends the conventional touch table interface with hand tracking and 3D visualization to enable interaction in the positive parallax plane, where the binocular focus falls behind the screen so as not to occlude projected images. This paper covers the system design, human factors and ergonomics considerations for an interactive and immersive gesture-based visualization system. Results are presented from a preliminary user study that validates the usability of VizSpace.
In this paper an intuitive human interface is presented which allows for an operator immersed in a virtual environment to remotely control a teleoperated agent with minimal cognitive overload and minimal risk of accidental input. Additionally, a cursor-based interface is presented allowing for the placement of navigation nodes for the agent, thus facilitating robot's autonomous navigation functions to be executed.
