Hyper-Natural Interaction

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From the course by University of London

3D Interaction Design in Virtual Reality

24 ratings

University of London

3D Interaction Design in Virtual Reality

24 ratings

Course 3 of 5 in the Specialization Virtual Reality

This course will teach you about one of the most important aspects of VR, how you interact with a VR world. Virtual Reality is completely different from an on screen app or game. You are completely immersed in a VR world, so it doesn't make sense to interact only through buttons or menus. You will get the most out of VR if you can interact with the world just as you would with the real world: with your natural body movements. You will learn about the basic concepts and technologies of VR Interaction. You will then get hands on, learning about how to move around in VR and how to interact with the objects in your world. The course will finish with some advice from experts on VR interaction design and you will do a project where you will get real experience of developing VR Interaction.

From the lesson

Interacting with Objects in VR

Welcome to Week 3! This week, we will be looking at interacting with objects in VR. We'll cover topics such as interacting with objects within reach, hyper-natural interaction, and magic interaction. We'll then move on to physics interaction, and how this works in VR.

Introduction to Objects Interaction | Part 15:51

Introduction to Objects Interaction | Part 25:01

Object Interaction Within Reach4:43

Hyper-Natural Interaction4:07

Magic Interaction6:50

Evaluation Metrics4:41

Meet the Instructors

Dr Sylvia Xueni Pan
Lecturer, Department of Computing
Goldsmiths, University of London
Dr Marco Gillies
Senior Lecturer
Computing Department, Goldsmiths, University of London

It is the most natural and intuitive way to

interact with objects directly using our hands.

But by doing so, we're limited to be able to only interact with objects within reach.

Because of this, researchers have been keen to explore ways to expand

our ability to use our hands to interact with objects beyond our arm length.

These kinds of methods are normally called hyper-natural interaction

because it extends users' natural movements by giving them superpowers.

For instance, we can extend user's arms.

We can give the user much longer arms and

linearly map the virtual hands' movement to their real hands.

So, when my hands are 10 centimeters in front of me,

my virtual hands are 40 centimeters away,

and when my hands are 70 centimeters away,

my virtual hands are 280 centimeters away.

This might feel a bit weird and unnatural as generally we have

a good sense of where our hands are and how much they have moved.

We're in particular sensitive to discrepancies

when we have our arm relatively close to our body.

As for most of the tasks we do in everyday life,

we have our hands within this range.

A more carefully thought and very famous attempt to generate the illusion of

arm extension is the go-go technique created by Poupyrev et al.

in 1996.

It defines a radius around the user about two thirds of their physical arm length,

an area we're very sensitive and familiar with.

And within this radius,

the user has a direct one-to-one mapping of their physical hand to the virtual one.

So I'll be interacting with objects within this range just like I do in real life.

But beyond this radius,

the virtual arm is designed to be mapped non-linearly to the real arm,

which allows the virtual arm to be further away than the real arm.

Just like when my arm is about 45 centimeters away from me,

the virtual arm is also 45 centimeters long,

but after this point,

it starts to grow longer.

And the further away my real arm is,

the longer my virtual arm grows.

So when I fully extend my arms,

which is probably about 70 centimeters long,

my virtual arm could be about 200 centimeters away from me,

depending on how I set the parameters in the equation.

This method enables the user to reach things further out and the parameters

can be adjusted depending on the task and user's personal preference,

but the equation itself limits the maximum distance the users could grow their arms,

which reflects our limitation in selecting and manipulating distant objects.

Finally, the equation also creates

a smooth transition between the linear and non-linear mapping,

which means that the arm will gradually

increase and it will be very subtle and not noticeable.

Overall, the go-go technique is very intuitive and easy to learn.

And unlike some other methods which allow the user to grow their arms infinitely,

this method puts constraints to how much and how quickly we should grow our arms.

These constraints reflect our natural ability in dealing with objects from

a distance and thus prevent this superpower from becoming out of control.

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