Publication | ACM SIGCHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems 2022

In-Depth Mouse

Integrating Desktop Mouse into Virtual Reality

This paper describes a technique that integrates a desktop mouse into VR to support productive design work. Our approach uses Depth-Adaptive Cursor, a 2D-mouse driven pointing technique for 3D selection with depth-adaptation that continuously interpolates the cursor depth by inferring what users intend to select based on the cursor position, the viewpoint, and the selectable objects in the scene.

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Abstract

In-Depth Mouse: Integrating Desktop Mouse into Virtual Reality

Qian Zhou, George Fitzmaurice, Fraser Anderson

ACM SIGCHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems 2022 (Honorable Mention)

Virtual Reality (VR) has the potential for productive knowledge work, however, midair pointing with controllers or hand gestures does not offer the precision and comfort of traditional 2D mice. Directly integrating mice into VR is difficult as selecting targets in a 3D space is negatively impacted by binocular rivalry, perspective mismatch, and improperly calibrated control-display (CD) gain. To address these issues, we developed Depth-Adaptive Cursor , a 2D-mouse driven pointing technique for 3D selection with depth adaptation that continuously interpolates the cursor depth by inferring what users intend to select based on the cursor position, the viewpoint, and the selectable objects. Depth-Adaptive Cursor uses a novel CD gain tool to compute a usable range of CD gains for general mouse-based pointing in VR. A user study demonstrated that Depth-Adaptive Cursor significantly improved performance compared with an existing mouse-based pointing technique without depth-adaption in terms of time (21.2%), error (48.3%), perceived workload, and user satisfaction.

While VR is widely considered an independent medium separate from the desktop environment, there has been a recent effort to join these interfaces into one unified environment. This has great relevance to applications with 3-dimensional extensions that can be experienced in VR or AR environments.

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