WatchVR: Exploring the Usage of a Smartwatch for Interaction in Mobile Virtual Reality

ABSTRACT

Mobile virtual reality (VR) head-mounted displays (HMDs) are steadily becoming part of people's everyday life. Most current interaction approaches rely either on additional hardware (e.g. Daydream Controller) or offer only a liMassachusetts Institute of Technologyed interaction concept (e.g. Google Cardboard). We explore a solution where a conventional smartwatch, a device users already carry around with them, is used to enable short interactions but also allows for longer complex interactions with mobile VR. To explore the possibilities of a smartwatch for interaction, we conducted a user study in which we compared two variables with regard to user performance: interaction method (touchscreen vs inertial sensors) and wearing method (hand-held vs wrist-worn). We found that selection time and error rate were lowest when holding the smartwatch in one hand using its inertial sensors for interaction (hand-held).

References

1. Daniel L Ashbrook. 2010. Enabling mobile microinteractions. Georgia Institute of Technology.
2. Wolff Dobson. 2015. Lightning Talk: Bite-Sized VR. (2015). Retrieved January 2, 2018 from https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MueSHMNyGtM.
3. Statista (EMarketer). 2018. Number of mobile virtual reality (VR) users worldwide from 2015 to 2020 (in millions). (2018). Retrieved January 3, 2018 from https://www.statista.com/statistics/650834/ mobile-vr-users-worldwide/.
4. Tovi Grossman and Ravin Balakrishnan. 2006. The design and evaluation of selection techniques for 3D volumetric displays. In Proc. UIST 2006. ACM, 3--12.
5. Jan Gugenheimer. 2016. Nomadic Virtual Reality: Exploring New Interaction Concepts for Mobile Virtual Reality Head-Mounted Displays. In Proc. UIST'16 (UIST '16 Adjunct). ACM, New York, NY, USA, 9--12.
6. 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 Proc. UIST'16. ACM, New York, NY, USA, 49--60.
7. Daniel Kharlamov, Brandon Woodard, Liudmila Tahai, and Krzysztof Pietroszek. 2016. TickTockRay: smartwatch-based 3D pointing for smartphone-based virtual reality. In Proc. of the 22nd ACM Conference on Virtual Reality Software and Technology. ACM, 363--364.
8. JJ-W Lin, Henry Been-Lirn Duh, Donald E Parker, Habib Abi-Rached, and Thomas A Furness. 2002. Effects of field of view on presence, enjoyment, memory, and simulator sickness in a virtual environment. In Virtual Reality, 2002. Proceedings. IEEE. IEEE, 164--171.
9. Kent Lyons. 2016. 2D Input for Virtual Reality Enclosures with Magnetic Field Sensing. In Proc.of the 2016 ACM International Symposium on Wearable Computers (ISWC '16). ACM, New York, NY, USA, 176--183.
10. Nasa. 2018. Task Load Index (Nasa-TLX). (2018). Retrieved January 5, 2018 from https://ntrs.nasa.gov/archive/nasa/casi.ntrs. nasa.gov/20000021487.pdf.
11. Krzysztof Pietroszek, Liudmila Tahai, James R Wallace, and Edward Lank. 2017. Watchcasting: Freehand 3D interaction with off-the-shelf smartwatch. In 3D User Interfaces (3DUI), 2017 IEEE Symposium on. IEEE, 172--175.
12. Boris Smus and Christopher Riederer. 2015. Magnetic Input for Mobile Virtual Reality. In Proc.of the 2015 ACM International Symposium on Wearable Computers (ISWC '15). ACM, New York, NY, USA, 43--44.
13. Christian Winkler, Ken Pfeuffer, and Enrico Rukzio. 2012. Investigating Mid-air Pointing Interaction for Projector Phones. In Proc.of the 2012 ACM International Conference on Interactive Tabletops and Surfaces (ITS '12). ACM, New York, NY, USA, 85--94.

Index Terms

• Human-centered computing

  • Human computer interaction (HCI)