Investigating controller less input methods for smartphone based virtual reality platforms

Abstract

With the advent of the low-cost headsets, Virtual Reality (VR) applications have gained enormous attention and popularity. Object selection is the primary task in VR interfaces. Although numerous studies have been done for the selection of objects, there is limited understanding of how the input methods affect the object selection in sparse, dense and occluded dense Virtual Environment (VE). In this paper, we investigate the commonly used input methods (capacitive touch and dwell gaze) for a smartphone-based VR head-mounted device. We evaluate the task completion time, error rates, ease of use, comfort and user preference correlated to the proposed VEs. The results indicated that capacitive touch was a preferred method of selection in dense and occluded dense VEs. The users preferred dwell gaze in the sparsely populated VE.