Planet Purifiers: A Collaborative Immersive Experience Proposing New Modifications to HOMER and Fishing Reel Interaction Techniques

TL;DR

This paper introduces a collaborative immersive VR experience that raises awareness about pollution, featuring novel modifications to interaction techniques HOMER and Fishing Reel to improve user engagement and efficiency.

Contribution

It proposes new enhancements to HOMER and Fishing Reel interaction techniques, specifically FLOW-MATCH and RAWR-XD, to improve pollution collection and wildlife feeding in virtual environments.

Findings

Enhanced pollutant collection with cone volume (FLOW-MATCH)

Improved wildlife feeding via asymmetric bi-manual technique (RAWR-XD)

Increased efficiency in collaborative VR pollution awareness experience

Abstract

This paper presents our solution to the 2025 3DUI Contest challenge. We aimed to develop a collaborative, immersive experience that raises awareness about trash pollution in natural landscapes while enhancing traditional interaction techniques in virtual environments. To achieve these objectives, we created an engaging multiplayer game where one user collects harmful pollutants while the other user provides medication to impacted wildlife using enhancements to traditional interaction techniques: HOMER and Fishing Reel. We enhanced HOMER to use a cone volume to reduce the precise aiming required by a selection raycast to provide a more efficient means to collect pollutants at large distances, coined as FLOW-MATCH. To improve the animal feed distribution to wildlife far away from the user with Fishing Reel, we created RAWR-XD, an asymmetric bi-manual technique to more conveniently adjust the reeling speed using the non-selecting wrist rotation of the user.