Assessing Visualization and Interaction Techniques to Support Comparison Tasks in Virtual Reality

Henrike Weingärtner, Julian Rasch, Nils Rothamel, Florian Müller

CHI EA 2025

Proceedings of the Extended Abstracts of the CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems

TL;DR

What we did: We conducted a controlled experiment to assess various visualization and interaction techniques for comparison tasks in Virtual Reality environments.

What we found: We found that button interactions significantly outperformed gesture interactions in usability, with specific visualization techniques providing distinct advantages for maintaining an overview or identifying details.

Takeaway: Our study contributes actionable insights for designing more effective Virtual Reality applications that enhance user experience by optimizing interaction modalities and visualization methods.

Abstract

Desktop screens are effective for supporting comparison tasks, but as the scale increases to room-sized or larger structures, context is lost. Users are forced to focus on isolated details through panning, zooming, and scrolling, making it difficult to maintain an overview while exploring finer details. Virtual Reality (VR) potentially offers a solution to this problem by immersing users in 3D spaces and enabling more intuitive comparisons. While related work has proposed many solutions for visualizing and interacting for comparison tasks in desktop environments, knowledge regarding the efficacy of supporting such tasks in VR environments is still lacking. We investigated varying visualization and interaction techniques in a controlled experiment with 24 participants. Our findings provide valuable insights for designing VR systems that improve usability, reduce workload, and enhance performance in comparison tasks.