Mid-air modeling with Boolean operations in VR

PubDate: April 2017

Teams: Universidade de Lisboa；Tecgraf / PUC-Rio

Writers: Daniel Mendes ; Daniel Medeiros ; Maurício Sousa ; Ricardo Ferreira ; Alberto Raposo ; Alfredo Ferreira ; Joaquim Jorge

PDF: Mid-air modeling with Boolean operations in VR

Abstract

Virtual Reality (VR) is again in the spotlight. However, interactions and modeling operations are still major hurdles to its complete success. To make VR Interaction viable, many have proposed mid-air techniques because of their naturalness and resemblance to physical world operations. Still, natural mid-air metaphors for Constructive Solid Geometry (CSG) are still elusive. This is unfortunate, because CSG is a powerful enabler for more complex modeling tasks, allowing to create complex objects from simple ones via Boolean operations. Moreover, Head-Mounted Displays occlude the real self, and make it difficult for users to be aware of their relationship to the virtual environment. In this paper we propose two new techniques to achieve Boolean operations between two objects in VR. One is based on direct-manipulation via gestures while the other uses menus. We conducted a preliminary evaluation of these techniques. Due to tracking limitations, results allowed no significant conclusions to be drawn. To account for self-representation, we compared full-body avatar against an iconic cursor depiction of users’ hands. In this matter, the simplified hands-only representation improved efficiency in CSG modelling tasks.