AlphaCursor
Ray-casting with a cursor pushed into depth by joystick; objects in front of the cursor turn transparent so hidden targets become visible.
How it works
The user points a ray and moves a cursor along it with the joystick. Objects between the user and the cursor are rendered fully transparent, progressively revealing occluded targets, and the target at the cursor is selected with the trigger.
Papers
- Difeng Yu, Qiushi Zhou, Joshua Newn, Tilman Dingler, Eduardo Velloso, Jorge Goncalves (2020). Fully-Occluded Target Selection in Virtual Reality. IEEE Transactions on Visualization and Computer Graphics doi:10.1109/tvcg.2020.3023606
- Rumeysa Turkmen, Zahra Rasoulifar, Anil Ufuk Batmaz (2026). VoiceRay: 3D Object Selection Technique for Occluded and Dense Environments in Virtual Reality. CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems (CHI '26) doi:10.1145/3772318.3790399
- Wang, Qiu, Li, Liu, Wei, Chen, Wang, Fan (2025). FocalSelect: Improving Occluded Objects Acquisition with Heuristic Selection and Disambiguation in Virtual Reality. IEEE Transactions on Visualization and Computer Graphics 31(5), 3285-3295 doi:10.1109/TVCG.2025.3549554
- Truillet, Dubois, Serrano (2025). Occlusion Reduction Techniques for the Selection of Physical Referents in AR: Adaptation and Evaluation of VR Techniques. IHM '25 (Conférence francophone sur l'Interaction Humain-Machine) doi:10.1145/3765712.3765719