Cinematic virtual reality (CVR) brings viewers a novel and immersive movie-watching experience. However, they may miss story events and scene transitions that the director has designed as key points hidden in the VR scene. In this paper, we introduce implicit gaze-based interaction for enhancing the exploration experience in CVR. In contrast to most research on gaze-based selection of objects or explicit guidance of attention using visual cues, we focus on implicit interaction that utilizes the user’s natural gaze and attention to explore the scene. We design and implement different gaze trigger methods for implicit interaction, making the interaction more intuitive and natural when users reveal the invisible objects. We implemented the adaptive collider technique, offering users a better sense of exploration than raycasting and spotlight techniques. We have also conducted user studies to compare animation sequences for visual feedback, with each animation sequence offering different storytelling techniques. One of the sequences is better suited for describing spaces in the virtual world, while the other sequence offers users the feeling of constructing a world through their gaze.

Virtual reality (VR) has been a promising technique to provide an immersive experience. Comparing to traditional multimedia, when users want to take a rest or change the position such as sitting down, the chair might not be sittable because of the inconsistency between the physical and the virtual chair. In this work, we utilized a tracker attached to a physical chair and conducted a user study to explore the sitting behavior when they interact with different forms of the virtual chair. Results indicate that visualizing each part of the chair could provide different information and affect trust and preference.

In this paper, we present Haptic Around, a hybrid-haptic feedback system, which utilizes fan, hot air blower, mist creator and heat light to recreate multiple tactile sensations in virtual reality for enhancing the immersive environment and interaction. This system consists of a steerable haptic device rigged on the top of the user head and a handheld device also with haptics feedbacks to simultaneously provide tactile sensations to the users in a 2m x 2m space. The steerable haptic device can enhance the immersive environment for providing full body experience, such as heat in the desert or cold in the snow mountain. Additionally, the handheld device can enhance the immersive interaction for providing partial body experience, such as heating the iron or quenching the hot iron. With our system, the users can perceive visual, auditory and haptic when they are moving around in virtual space and interacting with virtual object. In our study, the result has shown the potential of the hybrid-haptic feedback system, which the participants rated the enjoyment, realism, quality, immersion higher than the other.