Exploring the Effects of Intended Use on Targeting in Virtual Reality

Yuan Chen, Géry Casiez, Sylvain Malacria, Ed Lank

Abstract: Researchers have shown that distance and size are not the only factors that impact the target acquisition time in desktop interfaces, but that its intended use, whether it is selected, dragged, or otherwise manipulated, can also have a significant influence. However, despite the increasing popularity of virtual 3D environments, the intended use of targets in these contexts has never been investigated, in spite of the richer, multidimensional manipulations afforded by these environments. To better understand the effects of intended use on target acquisition in virtual environments, we present the results of a study examining five different manipulation tasks: targeting, dual-targeting, throwing, docking and reorienting. Our results demonstrate that the intended use of a target affects its acquisition time and, correspondingly, the movement towards the target. As these environments become more commonplace settings for work and play, our work provides valuable information on throughput, applicable to a wide range of tasks.

Track: HCI/visualization

Summary Of Changes:

Dear Reviewers,

Thank you so much for your helpful reviews! We made the following revisions based on the change suggestions from the meta-review:

[AC, R1]: We updated Sec 4.2 (Selection Time) & Sec 4.3 (Motion Kinematics) to include the results of differences between tasks. We included these results in Sec 5 (General Discussion) to support our original arguments. We also would like to point to paragraph 5 in Sec 5 where we discussed how our differences between tasks were similar/different from prior work.
[AC, R1, R2, R3]: We cleaned Sec 5.2 (Limitations) and highlighted the limitation of small IDs.
[AC, R1 & R3]: We added a figure in Sec 4.2 (Selection Time) to show the interaction effect between ID and Task and describe the significant differences between conditions.

In addition, we also made the following minor changes
[AC, R1]: We updated the text and now systematically refer to previous work using the authors’ names rather than the citation number only.
[R1]: We added Machuca and Stuerzlinger’s work to bring future work on exploring the interaction between intended use and directions.

We also would like to acknowledge the good practice to avoid the combination of red and green cues that we will apply in future work.

Thank you again.

Best Regards,
Authors of “Exploring the Effects of Intended Use on Targeting in Virtual Reality”