XR Input Error Mediation for Hand-Based Input: Task and Context Influences a User's Preference

TL;DR

This paper investigates how task and context influence user preferences for mediation techniques in XR hand-based input, highlighting the importance of context-aware design to improve user experience amid recognition errors.

Contribution

It provides empirical evidence on how user perceived error costs and context affect preferences for different mediation techniques in XR, informing future interaction design.

Findings

Context influences user error cost perceptions.

User preferences vary with task and scenario.

Design implications for XR error mediation techniques.

Abstract

Many XR devices use bare-hand gestures to reduce the need for handheld controllers. Such gestures, however, lead to false positive and false negative recognition errors, which detract from the user experience. While mediation techniques enable users to overcome recognition errors by clarifying their intentions via UI elements, little research has explored how mediation techniques should be designed in XR and how a user's task and context may impact their design preferences. This research presents empirical studies about the impact of user perceived error costs on users' preferences for three mediation technique designs, under different simulated scenarios that were inspired by real-life tasks. Based on a large-scale crowd-sourced survey and an immersive VR-based user study, our results suggest that the varying contexts within each task type can impact users' perceived error costs, leading to different preferred mediation techniques. We further discuss the study implications of these results on future XR interaction design.