Above Surface Interaction for Multiscale Navigation in Mobile Virtual Reality

TL;DR

This paper introduces an above surface interaction technique for mobile VR navigation, demonstrating improved performance and user preference over traditional 2D touch input in constrained physical environments.

Contribution

It presents a novel above surface interaction method for mobile VR navigation and provides empirical evidence of its advantages over traditional touch-based controls.

Findings

Above surface interaction outperforms pinch-to-zoom and drag-to-pan.

Participants preferred the above surface technique.

Significantly better navigation performance achieved.

Abstract

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.