FaceTouch: Enabling Touch Interaction in Display Fixed UIs for Mobile Virtual Reality
We present FaceTouch, a novel interaction concept for mobile Virtual Reality (VR) head-mounted displays (HMDs) that leverages the backside as a touch-sensitive surface. With FaceTouch, the user can point at and select virtual content inside their field-of-view by touching the corresponding location at the backside of the HMD utilizing their sense of proprioception. This allows for rich interaction (e.g. gestures) in mobile and nomadic scenarios without having to carry additional accessories (e.g. a gamepad). We built a prototype of FaceTouch and conducted two user studies. In the first study we measured the precision of FaceTouch in a display-fixed target selection task using three different selection techniques showing a low error rate of 2% indicate the viability for everyday usage. To asses the impact of different mounting positions on the user performance we conducted a second study. We compared three mounting positions of the touchpad (face, hand and side) showing that mounting the touchpad at the back of the HMD resulted in a significantly lower error rate, lower selection time and higher usability. Finally, we present interaction techniques and three example applications that explore the FaceTouch design space.
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Jan Gugenheimer, David Dobbelstein, Christian Winkler, Gabriel Haas, and Enrico Rukzio. 2016. FaceTouch: Enabling Touch Interaction in Display Fixed UIs for Mobile Virtual Reality. In Proceedings of the 29th Annual Symposium on User Interface Software and Technology (UIST ’16). ACM, New York, NY, USA, 49-60. DOI: https://doi.org/10.1145/2984511.2984576
Jan Gugenheimer, David Dobbelstein, Christian Winkler, Gabriel Haas, and Enrico Rukzio. 2016. FaceTouch: Touch Interaction for Mobile Virtual Reality. In Proceedings of the 2016 CHI Conference Extended Abstracts on Human Factors in Computing Systems (CHI EA ’16). ACM, New York, NY, USA, 3679-3682. DOI: https://doi.org/10.1145/2851581.2890242