Improving Interaction of Selecting Virtual Objects by Considering User’s Intentions

Abstract

The immersive virtual environment is widely used as a development environment for supplementary material in various fields. In order to provide better education in the educational environment, additionally or alternatively immersive virtual environment is often used such as for simulations, and it is also widely used in fields where there are many restrictions on external environments and time. As the content using the immersive virtual environment increases, it should be possible to provide high-accuracy interactions with the satisfaction so that users can have free and realistic experiences in the immersive virtual environment. In this paper, when selecting a virtual object for interaction, we propose a model and a method in which the object can be selected by considering the user’s intention with the distance between the virtual object and the user’s hand so that it can interact without error. A comparative experiment was conducted to select an object considering only the user’s intention and to select the object considering only the distance between the user’s hand and the virtual object. The user satisfaction of the method of selecting an object considering the user’s intention increased by 36.31% compared to the distance alone, demonstrating the usefulness of the method. Furthermore, in this paper, an experiment was conducted to find the optimal ratio that considers the user’s intention and the distance between the user’s hand and the virtual object by diversifying the placement situation of the object. This experiment demonstrates the effectiveness of the method to reflect user’s intentions than the distance of the user’s hand and the virtual object, increasing user satisfaction by 20.34% compared to the method when the distance is more reflected in the situation where the distance between virtual objects is close and dense. Finally, a method of weighting objects used in an ongoing situation by the user in consideration of the order of use is proposed. When selecting objects for interaction, a user experiment was conducted to compare the method that consider the order of use of the objects when objects are selected and that without considering the order of use of the objects. The results of this experiment show that when an object is placed in a position where it is difficult to pick it up for interaction, users prefer a method that allows the object to be selected in consideration of the order of use of the object.