CylinderPIM
Also known as Disocclusion Mini-map, Cylinder Projective Interactive Map
The left controller sweeps a large cone through the scene, and the objects inside appear live as small copies in a 3D cylinder held in that hand, keeping their full layout including depth; the right hand grabs the copy, which picks up the real object.
How it works
While the left trigger is held, a 1.5 m wide, 20 m long cone highlights objects, and their positions in the left controller's frame are stretched to fill a cylinder 0.48 m wide and tall, so relative positions are kept in all three dimensions. The right controller hovers over a copy and the grip grabs it; the copy leaves the map and the original object is picked up. The map keeps the last state when the trigger is released, and the scene itself is never changed. With 24 participants on a Quest 2 (128–512 spheres, target always occluded), search took 7.23 s against 8.73 s for GravityZone+, 7.52 s for ConeExpand and 6.02 s for DiscPIM; repeat trials took 4.49 s against 6.62 s for GravityZone+, with less effort than GravityZone+.
Papers
- Mykola Maslych, Yahya Hmaiti, Ryan Ghamandi, Paige Leber, Ravi Kiran Kattoju, Jacob Belga, Joseph J. LaViola (2023). Toward Intuitive Acquisition of Occluded VR Objects Through an Interactive Disocclusion Mini-map. IEEE Conference on Virtual Reality and 3D User Interfaces (VR) doi:10.1109/VR55154.2023.00061
- 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