CS 5678: Topics in Mixed Reality

This project focuses on investigating the relationship between people and their sense of invincibility within virtual environments when subjected to varying levels of perceived visual thermals, and thermal haptic feedback. There is little existing research that uses the term invincibility in this context, or that explores this concept in the space of virtual reality. We define invincibility as this sense of lowered cautiousness, which is theorized to be correlated with a lowered sense of presence and a lower level of virtual body ownership.

In the challenge of rendering the perceived weight for objects in Virtual Reality context, haptic devices are usually introduced to solve the issue. Regardless the size of these devices, hardware requirements make it less accessible for regular users. We will explore the area of creating the perceived weight by utilizing virtual environment visual cues. Specifically, we explore the weight perception by manipulating control-to-display (C/D) ratio on object both directly and indirectly, and tested potential techniques for maintaining the sense of presence while achieving pseudo weight perception.

This work demonstrates VRKeyboard - a joystick and button-based text input method in Virtual Reality that resembles the semantic appearance and functionality of older T9 phone keyboards. This work also presents a modified version, Cheat VRKeyboard, which attempts to further improve the user experience by adding a shortcut “cheat” layer. These come from a collective goal to design a VR-oriented keyboard that is intuitive in nature and is functionally adequate for VR users’ general needs. Through experimentation with users, VRKeyboard’s two designs were evaluated both qualitatively and quantitatively to observe if they align with user expectations of functionality while maintaining a consistent performance across multiple users.

In this paper we are proposing a new form of keyboard text input within virtual reality, SpliT9. We first built and evaluated two split keyboard models in virtual reality systems, one split keyboard using the Oculus Quest controllers and one using hand tracking. After testing and performing heuristic evaluations on each, we were able to draw design requirements for features for our new proposed split keyboard, SpliT9. After building the new split keyboard, we tested all three with users to see if it improved their overall experience.

For Augmented Reality (AR) try-on experience, one of the key aspects is the interaction design that helps to deliver a smooth and immersive experience. In this study, we compared two interaction design for the AR Try-on experience: AR HAT2, an AR interface that uses mid-air hand gestures to select virtual items, to change the color and to adjust the size, and a traditional touch-based interface that uses a list of buttons on the touchscreens. The results of our comparative evaluation showed that the usage of mid-air gestures is intuitive and comfortable for most users, and especially advantageous with a far-away screen. Our findings can be useful for AR fitting room developers and other AR practitioners.

This paper presents a heuristic study on the capabilities of a word-gesture based keyboard in virtual reality. Word-gesture keyboards enable faster text entry by allowing users to draw the shape of a word rather than typing each individual word character. Although adopted in touch devices, word-gesture keyboards have yet to be adopted as extensively in virtual reality applications. The text entry experience in virtual reality has become tiresome and error-prone using the basic, controller-based, point-and-click implementation. Although not a new method, our paper looks into what a word-gesture keyboard would look like in VR and the factors that might impact the usability and efficiency of the keyboard.