Technological advances enable the development of new low vision aids. One such new technology is virtual reality (VR). Existing VR applications ofer a variety of adjustments to the content and the user's environment to support people with low vision. Yet, an interaction concept to conveniently activate and control these aids is missing. Therefore, we designed and implemented an interaction concept based on user and expert feedback and evaluated it in a user study. Our application ofers various aids to support residual vision and a radial menu for intuitive use of these aids. The results of the user study show that the VR application allows simple task solving comparable to a desktop computer. Furthermore, the user study gives an insight into the efects of diferent visual impairments on the usage of VR, since the feld of view has a larger impact than visual acuity. Overall, our results indicate that VR is a suitable aid to support the individual needs of users with low vision. CCS CONCEPTS• Human-centered computing → Accessibility; Accessibility technologies.

Virtual Reality systems offer great possibilities to analyze and interact with data. However, they still lack a commonly accepted, efficient text input technique that allows users to record their findings. To provide users with an efficient technique for text input, a real keyboard and the user's hands are transferred into the virtual world. This allows real haptic feedback of the device and, as a user study shows, results in fast and accurate text writing. The proposed approach shows that a realworld ability can be transmitted directly into the virtual world without much loss.

The importance of remote collaboration grows in an interconnected world as the reasons to avoid travel increase. The spatial rendering and collaboration capabilities of virtual and augmented reality systems are well suited for tasks such as support or training. Users can take a shared perspective to build a common understanding. Also, users may engage in face-to-face cooperation to support interpersonal communication. However, a shared perspective and face-to-face collaboration are both desirable but naturally exclude each other. We place all users at the same location to provide a shared perspective. To avoid overlapping body parts, the avatars of the other connected users are shifted to the side. A redirected body pose modification corrects the resulting inconsistencies. The implemented system is compared to a baseline of two users standing in the same location and working with overlapping avatars. The results of a user study show that the proposed modifications provide an easy to use, efficient collaboration and yield higher co-presence and the feeling of teamwork. Applying redirection techniques to other users opens up novel ways to increase social presence for local or remote collaboration.

No abstract

With increasing task and system complexity, it becomes necessary to support workers, e.g. performing repair tasks, from a remote location. Current approaches utilize images or a video stream combined with annotations and speech to allow collaboration with remote users. We propose a technique that gives the remote supporter the ability to see a high fidelity point cloud of a real world object in Virtual Reality (VR). The VR user can indicate points of interest via a laser pointer. The local worker sees these indications on top of the real object with an Augmented Reality (AR) headset. A preliminary user study shows that the proposed method is faster and less error-prone regarding the comprehension of the object and the communication between the users. In addition to that, the system has a higher usability. This work shows that even non-virtual, collaborative tasks can be supported by new forms of user interaction using different technologies like VR and AR.