Modern VR/AR systems extend the natural hand-tracking UI with eye-based interaction Controllers, hand gestures, eye movements, and voice: many ways to click buttons in virtual reality environments. What about: glance at a UI object with your eyes, then simply pinch with your fingers to activate it. Apple innovates with the first wide adoption of this interaction style for their Vision Pro spatial computer. As well the Hololens 2 and Magic Leap offered similar functionalities. But Apple, renowned for stellar product design, may nail it. Early users are raving about the mind-blowing and telepathic technology.To shed light on the interaction design, we present 5 design principles and 5 design issues. These are based on human-computer interaction research, mostly the paper "Gaze + Pinch Interaction in Virtual Reality" presented at the 2017 Spatial User Interfaces symposium. We'll see how much Apple has considered the scientific roots when we get our hands on it! Design Principles Division of labor: The eyes select, the hands manipulateOur eyes' natural role involves indicating points of interest, and we can easily look at any point at will. In contrast, the hands are adept at physical manipulation through the interplay of finger movement and hand posture. Use a clear separation of

In 2D interfaces, actions are often represented by fixed tools arranged in menus, palettes, or dedicated parts of a screen, whereas 3D interfaces afford their arrangement at different depths relative to the user and the user can move them relative to each other. In this paper we introduce EyeSeeThrough as a novel interaction technique that utilises eye-tracking in VR. The user can apply an action to an intended object by visually aligning the object with the tool at the line-of-sight, and then issue a confirmation command. The underlying idea is to merge the two-step process of 1) selection of a mode in a menu and 2) applying it to a target, into one unified interaction. We present a user study where we compare the method to the baseline two-step selection. The results of our user study showed that our technique outperforms the two step selection in terms of speed and comfort. We further developed a prototype of a virtual living room to demonstrate the practicality of the proposed technique.

The exploration of large‐scale conflicts, as well as their causes and effects, is an important aspect of socio‐political analysis. Since event data related to major conflicts are usually obtained from different sources, researchers developed a semi‐automatic matching algorithm to integrate event data of different origins into one comprehensive dataset using hierarchical taxonomies. The validity of the corresponding integration results is not easy to assess since the results depend on user‐defined input parameters and the relationships between the original data sources. However, only rudimentary visualization techniques have been used so far to analyze the results, allowing no trustworthy validation or exploration of how the final dataset is composed. To overcome this problem, we developed VEHICLE, a web‐based tool to validate and explore the results of the hierarchical integration. For the design, we collaborated with a domain expert to identify the underlying domain problems and derive a task and workflow description. The tool combines both traditional and novel visual analysis techniques, employing statistical and map‐based depictions as well as advanced interaction techniques. We showed the usefulness of VEHICLE in two case studies and by conducting an evaluation together with conflict researchers, confirming domain hypotheses and generating new insights.