Abstract
Popular virtual reality systems today allow us to experience highly immersive applications in which virtual objects are realistically perceived via stereoscopic displays and can be directly manipulated based on hand-eye coordination in a very similar way as in the real world. However, the insufficiency of sensory feedback as well as the limited degrees-of-freedom of input motion still hinders precise and elaborate manipulation in virtual reality. Aiming at more precise 3D manipulation, we present a new method of extending the user’s spatial perception ability with the ‘virtual mirrors’ , which expose the hidden spatial information of given virtual scenes to the user. The movement of a virtual mirror is automatically controlled by solving an optimization problem iteratively, in which the objective function prefers the placement of the mirror that can highlight the spatial relationship between the manipulated object and the object nearest to it. The optimization process is handled efficiently for each time step based on our method for finding the closest gap between any two objects based on the OBB (oriented bounding box) trees and our sampling-based approximate approach to the optimization problem. The usefulness of our method is demonstrated by several pilot applications under various usage scenarios, such as assembling construction toys and solving 3D dissection puzzles. The quantitative results of our user study show that the virtual mirror is very helpful in increasing the precision in 3D manipulation tasks in virtual reality.
Highlights
We have observed the rapid development and popularization of immersive virtual reality technologies for the last decade
Inspired by the rear-view and side-view mirrors in the real-world vehicles, which expose spatial information hidden in the blind spots, we provide the user in our virtual reality system with a ‘virtual mirror’ that reveals the hidden sides of given virtual scenes from a diversity of views
An algorithm based on the OBB trees, precomputed for each object, efficiently identifies the region of interest (ROI) where the gap between the object manipulated by the user and the object closest to it is minimized
Summary
We have observed the rapid development and popularization of immersive virtual reality technologies for the last decade. One of the key advantages of virtual reality over the other interaction technologies is that the user immersed in virtual reality is able to directly manipulate 3D objects by coordinating his/her hands and eyes in a very similar way as in the real world. Typical motion controllers nowadays can trace the rigidbody motion of 6 DOFs, but mostly fall short of the ability to track the skeletal motion of higher DOFs, such as finger movements, which would be helpful for minute control of the position and orientation of virtual objects As another reason, the lack of the tactile feedback in virtual reality could significantly degrade the user’s spatial perception ability. We carried out a quantitative user study with one of the applications, that is, a 3D shape reconstruction puzzle, and found that our virtual mirror was certainly effective in increasing the precision in the spatial alignment tasks involved in the puzzle
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