Exploring the Front Touch Interface for Virtual Reality Headsets

TL;DR

This paper introduces a novel front touch interface for VR headsets, demonstrating its feasibility through prototype development, user studies, and exploration of various interaction techniques, expanding VR UI possibilities.

Contribution

It presents a new front touch interface for VR headsets, including prototype implementation and exploration of interaction methods, which is a novel approach in VR UI design.

Findings

Touch sensor is suitable for mobile VR due to low cost and power.

Front touch area enables diverse multi-finger interactions.

User studies show intuitive and accurate interaction with the front touch interface.

Abstract

In this paper, we propose a new interface for virtual reality headset: a touchpad in front of the headset. To demonstrate the feasibility of the front touch interface, we built a prototype device, explored VR UI design space expansion, and performed various user studies. We started with preliminary tests to see how intuitively and accurately people can interact with the front touchpad. Then, we further experimented various user interfaces such as a binary selection, a typical menu layout, and a keyboard. Two-Finger and Drag-n-Tap were also explored to find the appropriate selection technique. As a low-cost, light-weight, and in low power budget technology, a touch sensor can make an ideal interface for mobile headset. Also, front touch area can be large enough to allow wide range of interaction types such as multi-finger interactions. With this novel front touch interface, we paved a way to new virtual reality interaction methods.