Touching The Droid: Understanding and Improving Touch Precision With Mobile Devices in Virtual Reality
Fengyuan Zhu, Zhuoyue Lyu, Maurício Sousa, Tovi Grossman · 2022
Touch interaction with physical smartphones and tablets in Virtual Reality offers interesting opportunities for cross-device input. Unfortunately, any imprecision in the alignment of the visual representation of either the hand or device can impact the precision of touch and the realism of the experience. We first study a user’s ability to rely solely on preoperative feedback to perform touch interaction in VR, where no rendering of the hand is provided. Results indicate that touch in VR is possible without a visual representation of the hand, but accuracy is influenced by how the device is held and the distance traveled to the target. We then introduce a dynamic calibration algorithm to minimize the offset between the physical hand and its virtual representation. In a second study, we show that this algorithm can increase touch accuracy by 43%, and minimize depth-based “screen penetration” or “floating touch” errors.