A compelling property of virtual reality is that it allows users to interact with objects as they would in the real world. However, such interactions are limited to space within reach. We present Poros, a system that allows users to rearrange space. After marking a portion of space, the distant marked space is mirrored in a nearby proxy. Thereby, users can arrange what is within their reachable space, making it easy to interact with multiple distant spaces as well as nearby objects. Proxies themselves become part of the scene and can be moved, rotated, scaled, or anchored to other objects. Furthermore, they can be used in a set of higher-level interactions such as alignment and action duplication. We show how Poros enables a variety of tasks and applications and also validate its effectiveness through an expert evaluation.

Learning to move the hands in particular ways is essential in many training andleisure virtual reality applications, yet challenging. Existing techniques that support learning of motor movement in virtual reality rely on external cues such as arrows showing where to move or transparent hands showing the target movement. We propose a technique where the avatar's hand movement is corrected to be closer to the target movement. This embeds guidance in the user's avatar, instead of in external cues and minimizes visual distraction. Through two experiments, we found that such movement guidance improves the short-term retention of the target movement when compared to a control condition without guidance.

Spatial recordings allow viewers to move within them and freely choose their viewpoint. However, such recordings make it easy to miss events and difficult to follow moving objects when skipping through the recording. To alleviate these problems we present the Who Put That There system that allows users to navigate through time by directly manipulating objects in the scene. By selecting an object, the user can navigate to moments where the object changed. Users can also view trajectories of objects that changed location and directly manipulate them to navigate. We evaluated the system with a set of sensemaking questions in a think-aloud study. Participants understood the system and found it useful for finding events of interest, while being present and engaged in the recording.

We rely on our sight when manipulating objects. When objects are occluded, manipulation becomes difficult. Such occluded objects can be shown via augmented reality to re-enable visual guidance. However, it is unclear how to do so to best support object manipulation. We compare four views of occluded objects and their effect on performance and satisfaction across a set of everyday manipulation tasks of varying complexity. The best performing views were a see-through view and a displaced 3D view. The former enabled participants to observe the manipulated object through the occluder, while the latter showed the 3D view of the manipulated object offset from the object's real location. The worst performing view showed remote imagery from a simulated hand-mounted camera. Our results suggest that alignment of virtual objects with their real-world location is less important than an appropriate point-of-view and view stability.

It has been argued that transparent displays are beneficial for certain tasks by allowing users to simultaneously see on-screen content as well as the environment behind the display. However, it is yet unclear how much in background awareness users gain and if performance suffers for tasks performed on the transparent display, since users are no longer shielded from distractions. Therefore, we investigate the influence of display transparency on task performance and background awareness in a dual-task scenario. We conducted an experiment comparing transparent displays with conventional displays in different horizontal and vertical configurations. Participants performed an attention-demanding primary task on the display while simultaneously observing the background for target stimuli. Our results show that transparent and horizontal displays increase the ability of participants to observe the background while keeping primary task performance constant.