PoVRPoint: Authoring Presentations in Mobile Virtual Reality

TL;DR

PoVRPoint introduces a VR-based toolset for mobile presentation authoring, leveraging spatial and extended display capabilities to improve efficiency and usability over traditional tablet interfaces.

Contribution

This work presents PoVRPoint, a novel VR-enhanced presentation authoring system that combines pen and touch input with spatial interaction on mobile devices.

Findings

VR enables faster target slide identification for salient targets.

3D view in VR improves object reordering speed under occlusion.

Users found the interaction techniques usable and enjoyable.

Abstract

Virtual Reality (VR) has the potential to support mobile knowledge workers by complementing traditional input devices with a large three-dimensional output space and spatial input. Previous research on supporting VR knowledge work explored domains such as text entry using physical keyboards and spreadsheet interaction using combined pen and touch input. Inspired by such work, this paper probes the VR design space for authoring presentations in mobile settings. We propose PoVRPoint -- a set of tools coupling pen- and touch-based editing of presentations on mobile devices, such as tablets, with the interaction capabilities afforded by VR. We study the utility of extended display space to, for example, assist users in identifying target slides, supporting spatial manipulation of objects on a slide, creating animations, and facilitating arrangements of multiple, possibly occluded, shapes. Among other things, our results indicate that 1) the wide field of view afforded by VR results in significantly faster target slide identification times compared to a tablet-only interface for visually salient targets; and 2) the three-dimensional view in VR enables significantly faster object reordering in the presence of occlusion compared to two baseline interfaces. A user study further confirmed that the interaction techniques were found to be usable and enjoyable.