Comparing Controller With the Hand Gestures Pinch and Grab for Picking Up and Placing Virtual Objects

TL;DR

This paper compares various gesture-based methods for grabbing and placing virtual objects in AR/VR, highlighting the limitations of pinch gestures and proposing alternative techniques to improve naturalness and functionality.

Contribution

The paper introduces and evaluates new gesture-based approaches for object manipulation, addressing the limitations of pinch gestures in AR/VR environments.

Findings

Pinch gestures can be unnatural and limit gesture diversity.

Proposed methods improve naturalness and accuracy of object manipulation.

Performance metrics favor alternative gestures over pinch-based methods.

Abstract

Grabbing virtual objects is one of the essential tasks for Augmented, Virtual, and Mixed Reality applications. Modern applications usually use a simple pinch gesture for grabbing and moving objects. However, picking up objects by pinching has disadvantages. It can be an unnatural gesture to pick up objects and prevents the implementation of other gestures which would be performed with thumb and index. Therefore it is not the optimal choice for many applications. In this work, different implementations for grabbing and placing virtual objects are proposed and compared. Performance and accuracy of the proposed techniques are measured and compared.