# Before hands disappear: Effect of early warning visual feedback method for hand tracking failures in virtual reality

## TL;DR

This paper introduces a visual warning system that improves hand tracking in VR, making tasks faster and more reliable.

## Contribution

A novel early warning visual feedback method to enhance hand tracking reliability in VR.

## Key findings

- The early warning system reduces task completion time and hand-tracking failures by up to 83%.
- It decreases errors and cognitive load while improving system usability in VR tasks.
- The method is effective in both object manipulation and complex assembly tasks.

## Abstract

Virtual hand representation in Head-Mounted Displays (HMDs) offers immersive and intuitive interactions in Virtual Reality (VR). However, current hand tracking algorithms are prone to errors, which can disrupt the user experience and hinder task performance. This paper presents a novel method for providing users with visual feedback when the quality of hand tracking decreases. Our approach employs a notification modal that warns users of potential failures. We identified three common hand tracking failure scenarios and evaluated the effectiveness of our method in two distinct VR tasks: object manipulation and complex assembly tasks. Results show that our early warning system reduces task completion time, lowers hand-tracking failures by up to 83%, decreases errors, improves system usability, and reduces cognitive load. This work contributes to the development of more robust and user-friendly VR HMD applications by enhancing hand tracking reliability, usability, and workload.