Controlling Continuous Locomotion in Virtual Reality with Bare Hands Using Hand Gestures

Abstract

Moving around in a virtual world is one of the essential interactions for Virtual Reality (VR) applications. The current standard for moving in VR is using a controller. Recently, VR Head Mounted Displays integrate new input modalities such as hand tracking which allows the investigation of different techniques to move in VR. This work explores different techniques for bare-handed locomotion since it could offer a promising alternative to existing freehand techniques. The presented techniques enable continuous movement through an immersive virtual environment. The proposed techniques are compared to each other in terms of efficiency, usability, perceived workload, and user preference.

Portable Head-Mounted System for Mobile Forearm Tracking

“…Nowadays, several VR/AR headsets have built-in hand-tracking capabilities, like Microsoft Hololens 2 [32][33][34] and Meta Quest [35,36].…”

A Collaborative Virtual Walkthrough of Matera’s Sassi Using Photogrammetric Reconstruction and Hand Gesture Navigation

“…As mouse and keyboard reduce the naturalness of the interaction [23], novel human-computer interaction (HCI) techniques were developed to improve scene visualization and interaction in XR applications, but their use often requires expertise and/or costly devices like smart glasses, head-mounted displays, and their controllers. Freehand locomotion outperforms traditional controller-based locomotion in terms of immersion and task performance [24,25]. Hand gestures serve as a natural and intuitive interaction modality for a variety of application [26,27] and Hand Gesture Recognition (HGR) systems can be used with a simple Red, Green, and Blue wavelengths (RGB) camera [28]; thus, HGR makes VR and XR technology more accessible for collaborative purposes [23,26,28].…”