Hello all, We will have our bi-weekly HCI group meeting at 12.30pm on Tuesday Oct 8th in the DGP seminar room.
Rahul and Dev will be practicing their UIST talk. Food will be served.
Rahul’s Talk
Title MagicalHands: Mid-Air Hand Gestures for Animating in VR (UIST 2019 Practice)
Abstract We explore the use of hand gestures for authoring animations in virtual reality (VR). We first perform a gesture elicitation study to understand user preferences for a spatiotemporal, bare-handed interaction system in VR. Specifically, we focus on creating and editing dynamic, physical phenomena (e.g., particle systems, deformations, coupling), where the mapping from gestures to animation is ambiguous and indirect. We present commonly observed mid-air gestures from the study that cover a wide range of interaction techniques, from direct manipulation to abstract demonstrations. To this end, we extend existing gesture taxonomies to the rich spatiotemporal interaction space of the target domain and distill our findings into a set of guidelines that inform the design of natural user interfaces for VR animation.
Finally, based on our guidelines, we develop a proof-of-concept gesture-based VR animation system, MagicalHands. Our results, as well as feedback from user evaluation, suggest that the expressive qualities of hand gestures help users animate more effectively in VR.
Dev’s Talk
Title: Plane, Ray, and Point: Enabling Precise Spatial Manipulations with Shape Constraints
Abstract: We present Plane, Ray, and Point, a set of interaction techniques that utilizes shape constraints to enable quick and precise object alignment and manipulation in virtual reality. Users create the three types of shape constraints, Plane, Ray, and Point, by using symbolic gestures. The shape constraints are used like scaffoldings to limit and guide the movement of virtual objects. The same set of gestures can be performed with the other hand, which allow users to further control the degrees of freedom for precise and constrained manipulation. The combination of shape constraints and bimanual gestures yield a rich set of interaction techniques to support object transformation. An exploratory study conducted with 3D design experts and novice users found the techniques to be useful in 3D scene design workflows and easy to learn and use.
Regards, Eric Lu