Abstract
This paper presents Force Push, a novel gesture-based interaction technique for remote object manipulation in virtual reality (VR). Inspired by the design of magic powers in popular culture, Force Push uses intuitive hand gestures to drive physics-based movement of the object. Using a novel algorithm that dynamically maps rich features of hand gestures to the properties of the physics simulation, both coarse-grained ballistic movements and fine-grained refinement movements can be achieved seamlessly and naturally. An initial user study of a limited translation task showed that, although its gesture-to-force mapping is inherently harder to control than traditional position-to-position mappings, Force Push is usable even for extremely difficult tasks. Direct position-to-position control outperformed Force Push when the initial distance between the object and the target was close relative to the required accuracy; however, the gesture-based method began to show promising results when they were far away from each other. As for subjective user experience, Force Push was perceived as more natural and fun to use, even though its controllability and accuracy were thought to be inferior to direct control. This paper expands the design space of object manipulation beyond mimicking reality, and provides hints on using magical gestures and physics-based techniques for higher usability and hedonic qualities in user experience.
Highlights
Many people fantasize about remotely manipulating real-world objects, as we can see from the frequent appearance of “telekinesis” as a magic power in popular media
We found that the addition of the freeze gesture greatly enhanced the controllability since the user could stop the object at a desired location any time
We conducted post-hoc Bonferroni-corrected t-tests to compare the two techniques at each level of difficulty, and found that the direct control technique was significantly faster than Force Push at the three lower levels of difficulty (p < 0.001)
Summary
Many people fantasize about remotely manipulating real-world objects, as we can see from the frequent appearance of “telekinesis” as a magic power in popular media. The user first grabs the object using a remote selection technique (e.g., ray-casting or arm extension), the movement of the object follows the movement of the hand using a zero-order, positional mapping between the two (Bowman and Hodges, 1997; Zhai, 1998; Bowman et al, 2004) The rationale behind this design pattern is simple: previous literature consistently shows that a Expressive Gesture Mappings for VR zero-order mapping provides superior performance and a more intuitive user experience compared to mappings, such as rateor acceleration-based control (Zhai, 1998). This is due to the fact that lower-order mappings are inherently more controllable, and because the drag-and-drop metaphor is relatable to how we manipulate objects in the real-world and in 2D user interfaces
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