Back to reality: transition techniques from short HMD-based virtual experiences to the physical world

Abstract

Every Virtual Reality (VR) experience has to end at some point. While there already exist concepts to design transitions for users to enter a virtual world, their return from the physical world should be considered, as well, as it is a part of the overall VR experience. We call the latter outro-transitions. In contrast to offboarding of VR experiences, that takes place after taking off VR hardware (e.g., HMDs), outro-transitions are still part of the immersive experience. Such transitions occur more frequently when VR is experienced periodically and for only short times. One example where transition techniques are necessary is in an auditorium where the audience has individual VR headsets available, for example, in a presentation using PowerPoint slides together with brief VR experiences sprinkled between the slides. The audience must put on and take off HMDs frequently every time they switch from common presentation media to VR and back. In a such a one-to-many VR scenario, it is challenging for presenters to explore the process of multiple people coming back from the virtual to the physical world at once. Direct communication may be constrained while VR users are wearing an HMD. Presenters need a tool to indicate them to stop the VR session and switch back to the slide presentation. Virtual visual cues can help presenters or other external entities (e.g., automated/scripted events) to request VR users to end a VR session. Such transitions become part of the overall experience of the audience and thus must be considered. This paper explores visual cues as outro-transitions from a virtual world back to the physical world and their utility to enable presenters to request VR users to end a VR session. We propose and investigate eight transition techniques. We focus on their usage in short consecutive VR experiences and include both established and novel techniques. The transition techniques are evaluated within a user study to draw conclusions on the effects of outro-transitions on the overall experience and presence of participants. We also take into account how long an outro-transition may take and how comfortable our participants perceived the proposed techniques. The study points out that they preferred non-interactive outro-transitions over interactive ones, except for a transition that allowed VR users to communicate with presenters. Furthermore, we explore the presenter-VR user relation within a presentation scenario that uses short VR experiences. The study indicates involving presenters that can stop a VR session was not only negligible but preferred by our participants.

Authoring With Virtual Reality Nuggets—Lessons Learned

“…Particularly, we find using transitioning methodology to be promising, also because transitioning techniques have already proven useful for improving the switching into a VR [e.g., to enhance the feeling of presence Slater et al (1994); Steinicke et al (2009)]. Work to build up on such challenges with respect to the conciseness of VR nugget experiences Horst et al (2021a) already proposed suitable transition techniques, however, a real-world application of such transitions with VR nuggets and the influence on concepts such as presence or the learning experience remains open.…”

HandyNotes: using the hands to create semantic representations of contextually aware real-world objects

“…Augmented Reality (AR) and Mixed Reality (MR) technology has been sought as a means to make the transition from virtual to physical environments easier for users, by allowing them to engage with holographic virtual objects that are contextually aware of their realworld environment [29]. Nonetheless, appropriate strategies and transition techniques are necessary in different usage contexts of the applications and the user tasks [14,24]. We observe that tasks such as digital annotation of physical objects still evoke several design challenges to support optimal user experience.…”