Solar-Casting
Also known as Solar
A sphere centred on the user's head grows as they swipe on the phone, and everything inside it becomes see-through and unselectable, so the phone's ray reaches objects hidden behind others anywhere around the user.
How it works
With a phone-driven VR headset, holding a touch for 300 ms turns the sphere on and vertical swipes change its radius with a speed-dependent gain. Objects inside it and in view become semi-transparent (Hide and Rotate modes were also tried). The ray snaps to objects on or outside the sphere, a bubble picks the nearest one when it misses, and a 1€ filter smooths it. In study 1 (12 participants, target marked) it matched Expand and Depth Ray in speed; in study 2 (12 participants, no marker, full occlusion) it had the fewest errors (10.7% vs 14.9% for Depth-Casting and 16.0% for Depth Ray) at the same speed as Depth Ray.
Papers
- Yuan Chen, Junwei Sun, Qiang Xu, Edward Lank, Pourang Irani, Wei Li (2021). Global Scene Filtering, Exploration, and Pointing in Occluded Virtual Space. Human-Computer Interaction – INTERACT 2021, LNCS 12936, 156-176 doi:10.1007/978-3-030-85607-6_11