Publications

Collaborative virtual environments afford new capabilities in telepresence applications, allowing participants to co-inhabit an environment to interact while being embodied via avatars. However, shared content within these environments often takes away the attention of collaborators from observing the non-verbal cues conveyed by their peers, resulting in less effective communication. Exaggerated gestures, abstract visuals, as well as a combination of the two, have the potential to improve the effectiveness of communication within these environments in comparison to familiar, natural non-verbal visualizations. We designed and conducted a user study where we evaluated the impact of these different non-verbal visualizations on users’ identification time, understanding, and perception. We found that exaggerated gestures generally perform better than non-exaggerated gestures, abstract visuals are an effective means to convey intentional reactions, and the combination of gestures with abstract visuals provides some benefits compared to their standalone counterparts.

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Precise 3D manipulation in virtual reality (VR) is essential for effectively aligning virtual objects. However, state-of-the-art VR manipulation techniques have limitations when high levels of precision are required, including the unnaturalness caused by scaled rotations and the increase in time due to degree-of-freedom (DoF) separation in complex tasks. We designed two novel techniques to address these issues: AMP-IT, which offers direct manipulation with an adaptive scaled mapping for implicit DoF separation, and WISDOM, which offers a combination of Simple Virtual Hand and scaled indirect manipulation with explicit DoF separation. We compared these two techniques against baseline and state-of-the-art manipulation techniques in a controlled experiment. Results indicate that WISDOM and AMP-IT have significant advantages over best-practice techniques regarding task performance, usability, and user preference.

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For touch typists, using a physical keyboard ensures optimal text entry task performance in immersive virtual environments. However, successful typing depends on the user’s ability to accurately position their hands on the keyboard after performing other, non-keyboard tasks. Finding the correct hand position depends on sensory feedback, including visual information. We designed and conducted a user study where we investigated the impact of visual representations of the keyboard and users' hands on the time required to place hands on the homing bars of a keyboard after performing other tasks. We found that this keyboard homing time decreased as the fidelity of visual representations of the keyboard and hands increased, with a video pass-through condition providing the best performance. We discuss additional impacts of visual representations of a user's hands and the keyboard on typing performance and user experience in virtual reality.

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This paper presents our solution to the IEEE VR 2024 3DUI contest. We present The Alchemist, a VR experience tailored to aid children in practicing and mastering the four fundamental mathematical operators. In The Alchemist, players embark on a fantastical journey where they must prepare three potions to break a malevolent curse imprisoning the Gobbler kingdom. Our contributions include the development of a novel number input interface, Pinwheel, an extension of PizzaText, as well as four novel gestures, each corresponding to a distinct mathematical operator, designed to assist children in retaining practice with these operations. Preliminary tests indicate that Pinwheel and the four associated gestures facilitate the quick and efficient execution of mathematical operations.

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Collaboration plays a vital role in both academia and industry whenever we need to browse through a big amount of data to extract meaningful insights. These collaborations often involve people living far from each other, with different levels of access to technology. Effective cross-border collaborations require reliable telepresence systems that provide support for communication, cooperation, and understanding of contextual cues. In the context of collaborative academic writing, while immersive technologies offer novel ways to enhance collaboration and enable efficient information exchange in a shared workspace, traditional devices such as laptops still offer better readability for longer articles. We propose the design of a hybrid cross-reality cross-device networked system that allows the users to harness the advantages of both worlds. Our system allows users to import documents from their personal computers (PC) to an immersive headset, facilitating document sharing and simultaneous collaboration with both colocated colleagues and remote colleagues. Our system also enables a user to seamlessly transition between Virtual Reality, Augmented Reality, and the traditional PC environment, all within a shared workspace. We present the real-world scenario of a global academic team conducting a comprehensive literature review, demonstrating its potential for enhancing cross-reality hybrid collaboration and productivity.

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This paper presents our solution to the 2023 3DUI Contest challenge. Our goal was to provide an immersive VR experience to engage users in privately securing and accessing information in the Metaverse while improving authentication-related interactions inside our virtual environment. To achieve this goal, we developed an authentication method that uses a virtual environment's individual assets as security tokens. To improve the token selection process, we introduce the HOG interaction technique. HOG combines two classic interaction techniques, Hook and Go-Go, and improves approximate object targeting and further obfuscation of user password token selections. We created an engaging mystery-solving mini-game to demonstrate our authentication method and interaction technique.

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The ability to collaborate with other people across barriers created by time and/or space is one of the greatest features of modern communication. Immersive technologies are positioned to enhance this ability to collaborate even further. However, we do not have a firm understanding of how specific immersive technologies, or components thereof, alter the ability for two or more people to communicate, and hence collaborate. In this work-in-progress position paper, we propose a new framework for immersive collaboration experiences and provide an example of how it could be used to understand a hybrid collaboration among two co-located users and one remote user. We are seeking feedback from the community before conducting a formal evaluation of the framework. We also present some future work that this framework could facilitate.

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In this paper we present our solution to the 2022 3DUI Contest challenge. We aim to provide an immersive VR experience to increase player's awareness of trash pollution in the ocean while improving the current interaction techniques in virtual environments. To achieve these objectives, we adapted two classic interaction techniques, Go-Go and World in Miniature (WiM), to provide an engaging minigame in which the user collects the trash in the ocean. To improve the precision and address occlusion issues in the traditional Go-Go technique we propose ReX Go-Go. We also propose an adaptation to WiM, referred to as Rabbit-Out-of-the-Hat to allow an exocentric interaction for easier object retrieval interaction.

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