Breaking the Screen: Interaction Across Touchscreen Boundaries in Virtual Reality for Mobile Knowledge Workers

TL;DR

This paper explores how to enable seamless interaction between VR headsets and tablets for knowledge workers, addressing input constraints and extending touchscreen capabilities into virtual environments.

Contribution

It introduces novel interaction concepts for combining VR headsets with tablets and evaluates their usability in knowledge work scenarios.

Findings

Interaction across VR and tablets is feasible and effective.

Users preferred combined VR-tablet interactions for complex tasks.

New interaction techniques improve information access beyond single touchscreens.

Abstract

Virtual Reality (VR) has the potential to transform knowledge work. One advantage of VR knowledge work is that it allows extending 2D displays into the third dimension, enabling new operations, such as selecting overlapping objects or displaying additional layers of information. On the other hand, mobile knowledge workers often work on established mobile devices, such as tablets, limiting interaction with those devices to a small input space. This challenge of a constrained input space is intensified in situations when VR knowledge work is situated in cramped environments, such as airplanes and touchdown spaces. In this paper, we investigate the feasibility of interacting jointly between an immersive VR head-mounted display and a tablet within the context of knowledge work. Specifically, we 1) design, implement and study how to interact with information that reaches beyond a single physical touchscreen in VR; 2) design and evaluate a set of interaction concepts; and 3) build example applications and gather user feedback on those applications.