Detection Thresholds for Hand Redirection in Virtual Reality

We presented the paper "Estimating Detection Thresholds for Desktop-Scale Hand Redirection in Virtual Reality" at the IEEE VR 2019 Conference in Osaka, Japan.

Our paper presents the results of an experiment on interaction in virtual reality. In the experiment, an interaction technique known as hand redirection was investigated. With this technique, the virtual hand of a user in VR is displayed slightly offset from the real hand position, thereby "redirecting" the user's movement in real space.
From the results of the experiment it was possible to derive how much redirection can go unnoticed by the user, even in "worst case" scenarios. The findings are particularly important for the development of VR applications that aim to redirect users in an undetectable way, e.g. for haptic retargeting.

The paper was nominated in the category The IEEE Virtual Reality 2019 Best Conference Paper.

We derived lower-bound estimates of detection thresholds for horizontal, vertical and gain-based hand warping. In a 2AFC experiment, we explored these dimensions each in a very conservative scenario without distraction and two conservative but more realistic scenarios that distracted users from the redirection. Combining the results of all scenarios, we derived recommendations for each redirection technique. Our results indicate that within a certain range, desktop-scale VR hand redirection can go unnoticed by users, but that this range is narrow.

Estimating Detection Thresholds for Desktop-Scale Hand Redirection in Virtual Reality
André Zenner and Antonio Krüger
2019 IEEE Conference on Virtual Reality and 3D User Interfaces (VR 2019). March 23-27 Osaka, Japan. IEEE 2019
Full Paper available @ IEEE Xplore
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1109/VR.2019.8798143
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