Communications in Information and Systems

Volume 23 (2023)

Number 4

Natural hand remapping: velocity adaptive hand manipulation for VR

Pages: 393 – 422

DOI: https://dx.doi.org/10.4310/CIS.2023.v23.n4.a2

Authors

Yike Li (Department of Computer Science and Technology, Tsinghua University, Beijing, China)

Chen Wang (Department of Computer Science and Technology, Tsinghua University, Beijing, China)

Ge Yu (Technology and Engineering Center for Space Utilization, Chinese Academy of Sciences, Beijing, China)

Yu He (Beijing Institute of Mathematical Sciences and Applications, Beijing, China)

Stefanie Zollmann (Department of Computer Science, University of Otago, New Zealand)

Song-Hai Zhang (Department of Computer Science and Technology, Tsinghua University, Beijing, China)

Abstract

In virtual reality (VR), hand remapping modifies the commonly used one-to-one mapping between tracked and virtual hand positions, which extends the interaction scope of hands while also sacrificing naturalness. To address this issue, we propose remapping techniques that are both natural and efficient, taking hand movement velocity into consideration. Our approach is based on the insight that slow and fast hand velocities indicate the intent for precise or rapid manipulations respectively. Therefore, the hand movement should be scaled down or up accordingly. We first estimated the detection thresholds for remapped hands using a 2‑alternative-forced‑choice (2AFC) design. Based on these thresholds, we then designed a hand remapping function that automatically adjusts the remapping scale based on hand movement velocity. To evaluate the effectiveness of our proposed velocity-adaptive hand remapping technique, we further conducted a user study in which participants performed both rapid and precise tasks. Results showed that our proposed velocity-adaptive hand remapping, though imperceptible to participants, is able to significantly outperform other techniques. Overall, our work demonstrates the potential of velocity-guided redirection techniques for hand interactions in VR.

Keywords

hand remapping, detection thresholds, redirection techniques

Received 16 February 2023

Published 21 May 2024