You Invaded My Tracking Space! Using Augmented Virtuality for Spotting Passersby in Room-Scale Virtual Reality

Julius von Willich, Markus Funk, Florian Müller, Karola Marky, Jan Riemann, Max Mühlhäuser

DIS 2019

Proceedings of the 2019 on Designing Interactive Systems Conference - DIS '19

TL;DR

What we did: We designed and evaluated three different visualizations to represent physical passersby in a Virtual Environment using Augmented Virtuality.

What we found: We found that while the 2D-Image and Avatar representations allowed for the fastest spotting of passersby, the Avatar and 3D-Scan visualizations provided the most accurate location information.

Takeaway: Our research indicates that to minimize distractions and enhance user safety in Virtual Reality, it is beneficial to employ representations like the Avatar, which balances detail and immersion.

Abstract

With the proliferation of room-scale Virtual Reality (VR), more and more users install a VR system in their homes. When users are in VR, they are usually completely immersed in their application. However, sometimes passersby invade these tracking spaces and walk up to users that are currently immersed in VR to try and interact with them. As this either scares the user in VR or breaks the user’s immersion, research has yet to find a way to seamlessly represent physical passersby in virtual worlds. In this paper, we propose and evaluate three different ways to represent physical passersby in a Virtual Environment using Augmented Virtuality. The representations encompass showing a Pointcloud, showing a 3D-Model, and showing an Image Overlay of the passerby. Our results show that while an Image Overlay and a 3D-Model are the fastest representations to spot passersby, the 3D-Model and the Pointcloud representations were the most accurate.

Abstract

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