A VR Study on Freehand vs. Widgets for 3D Manipulation Tasks

Abstract

We present in this article the results of a study based on a hand-based 3D UI toolkit we developed which can be easily adapted and reused in VR applications with hand-tracking. We evaluated hand-based and widget-based manipulation methods as well as different multimodal cues for 3D manipulation and system-control tasks. Our study compared the manipulation methods in terms of performance, accuracy, and user acceptance. We found that free-hand manipulation is faster and preferred by the participants. We also analyzed the influence of the multimodal cues, finding valuable insights to integrate these cues to improve the user experience and accuracy in a 3D manipulation task.