ATOM VR - Area Twinned Object Manipulation in Virtual Reality

Abstract

Virtual Reality (VR) is finding growing use in entertainment, training, and design as hardware capabilities improve and prices fall. However, it is limited by current interaction mechanisms which do not allow effective manipulation of objects outside of arm's reach. The common raycast and its variants cannot easily select occluded objects, while widget based manipulation techniques require close proximity and many steps to attain precision. We designed and tested a hybrid, bi-manual interaction technique called Area Twinned Object Manipulation (ATOM). ATOM builds upon World-in-Miniature by cloning a remote region near the user, allowing local interaction to easily affect remote objects. We designed and ran experiment software to evaluate ATOM's object selection performance against the Go-Go and raycast selection techniques using the Unity game engine and a Meta Quest 2 VR Headset. Our experimental analysis indicates that ATOM requires fewer interactions with extraneous objects than Go-Go and raycast, thus improving efficiency of interaction. ATOM particularly excels in conditions in which objects are occluded or are at distance and was shown to induce no additional time requirement over the existing techniques. The design of ATOM combines selection and manipulation into one action, removing the need for a second discrete manipulation step. Future work is needed to evaluate ATOM's manipulation capabilities when applied to environmental design tasks, as well as its potential in other contexts such as space searching.