Invisible Boundaries for VR: Auditory and Haptic Signals as Indicators for Real World Boundaries

BoundaryScreen: Summoning the Home Screen in VR via Walking Outward

A safety boundary wall in VR is a virtual barrier that defines a safe area, allowing users to navigate and interact without safety concerns. However, existing implementations neglect to utilize the safety boundary wall's large surface for displaying interactive information. In this work, we propose the BoundaryScreen technique based on the "walking outward" metaphor to add interactivity to the safety boundary wall. Specifically, we augment the safety boundary wall by placing the home screen on it. To summon the home screen, the user only needs to walk outward until it appears. Results showed that (i) participants significantly preferred BoundaryScreen in the outermost two-step-wide ring-shaped section of a circular safety area; and (ii) participants exhibited strong "behavioral inertia" for walking, i.e., after completing a routine activity involving constant walking, participants significantly preferred to use the walking-based BoundaryScreen technique to summon the home screen.

Workspace Guardian: Investigating Awareness of Personal Workspace Between Co-Located Augmented Reality Users

As augmented reality (AR) systems proliferate and the technology gets smaller and less intrusive, we imagine a future where many AR users will interact in the same physical locations (e.g., in shared work places and public spaces). While previous research has explored AR collaboration in these spaces, our focus is on co-located but independent work. In this paper, we explore co-located AR user behavior and investigate techniques for promoting awareness of personal workspace boundaries. Specifically, we compare three techniques: showing all virtual content, visualizing bounding box outlines of content, and a self-defined workspace boundary. The findings suggest that a self-defined boundary led to significantly more personal workspace encroachments.

Fuzzy Evaluation Method for Haptic Perceptual Similarity

Tactile rendering in virtual interactive scenes plays an important role in improving the quality of user experience. The subjective rating is currently the mainstream measurement to assess haptic rendering realism, which ignores various subjective and objective uncertainties in the evaluation process and also neglects the mutual influence among tactile renderings. In this paper, we extend the existing subjective evaluation and systematically propose a fuzzy evaluation method of haptic rendering realism. Hierarchical fuzzy scoring based on confidence interval is introduced to reduce the difficulty of expressing tactile feeling with deterministic rating. After the fuzzy statistics based on the membership function, we further use close-degree and transitive closure to calculate the fuzzy equivalence matrix between different tactile renderings. Fuzzy clustering is carried out to complete the comprehensive evaluation in the case of multiple indicators. Five tactile objects are used to simulate various situations of tactile rendering. The experimental results of haptic perceptual similarity evaluation show the existence of fuzziness in the subjective evaluation and verify the feasibility of the proposed method applied to multi-indicator evaluation. We also conclude that the proposed method outperforms the existing methods in terms of time cost and labor cost.

Incorporating Situation Awareness Cues in Virtual Reality for Users in Dynamic in-Vehicle Environments

The increasing ubiquity and mobility of virtual reality (VR) devices has introduced novel use cases, one of which is using VR in vehicles, both human-driven and fully automated. However, the effects of the adoption of VR-in-the-car on user task performance, safety, trust, and perceived risk are still largely unknown or not fully understood. Blocking out the physical world and substituting it with a virtual environment has many potential benefits including fewer distractions and greater productivity. However, one shortcoming of this seclusion is losing situation awareness which becomes critical in dynamic, in-vehicle environments, even when the user is not in the driver's seat. Hence, this study aims to understand the effects of providing VR users with situation awareness cues about the real world, when riding in a human-driven or a fully automated car. The results of this driving simulator experiment provide valuable insights into passengers' experience and their information needs while immersed in VR environments. Identifying passengers' unique challenges and needs, as well as developing solutions for them, is expected to improve users' travel experience towards a wider adoption of VR devices.

Rear-Seat Productivity in Virtual Reality: Investigating VR Interaction in the Confined Space of a Car

Ubiquitous technology lets us work in flexible and decentralised ways. Passengers can already use travel time to be productive, and we envision even better performance and experience in vehicles with emerging technologies, such as virtual reality (VR) headsets. However, the confined physical space constrains interactions while the virtual space may be conceptually borderless. We therefore conducted a VR study (N = 33) to examine the influence of physical restraints and virtual working environments on performance, presence, and the feeling of safety. Our findings show that virtual borders make passengers touch the car interior less, while performance and presence are comparable across conditions. Although passengers prefer a secluded and unlimited virtual environment (nature), they are more productive in a shared and limited one (office). We further discuss choices for virtual borders and environments, social experience, and safety responsiveness. Our work highlights opportunities and challenges for future research and design of rear-seat VR interaction.