FaceDisplay: Towards Asymmetric Multi-User Interaction for Nomadic Virtual Reality

Mobile VR HMDs enable scenarios where they are being used in public, excluding all the people in the surrounding (Non-HMDUsers) and reducing them to be sole bystanders. We present FaceDisplay, a modified VR HMD consisting of three touch sensitive displays and a depth camera attached to its back. People in the surrounding can perceive the virtual world through the displays and interact with the HMD user via touch or gestures. To further explore the design space of FaceDisplay, we implemented three applications (FruitSlicer, SpaceFace and Conductor) each presenting different sets of aspects of the asymmetric co-located interaction (e.g. gestures vs touch). We conducted an exploratory userstudy (n=16), observing pairs of people experiencing two of the applications and showing a high level of enjoyment and social interaction with and without an HMD. Based on the findings we derive design considerations for asymmetric co-located VR applications and argue that VR HMDs are currently designed having only the HMD user in mind but should also include Non-HMD Users.

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Publications

Jan Gugenheimer, Evgeny Stemasov, Harpreet Sareen, and Enrico Rukzio. 2017. FaceDisplay: Towards Asymmetric Multi-User Interaction for Nomadic Virtual Reality In Proceedings of the 2018 CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems (CHI ’18).

Jan Gugenheimer, Evgeny Stemasov, Harpreet Sareen, and Enrico Rukzio. 2017. FaceDisplay: Enabling Multi-User Interaction for Mobile Virtual Reality. In Proceedings of the 2017 CHI Conference Extended Abstracts on Human Factors in Computing Systems (CHI EA ’17). ACM, New York, NY, USA, 369-372. DOI: https://doi.org/10.1145/3027063.3052962