Since artificial intelligence has been integrated into virtual reality, a new branch of virtual reality, which is called inverse virtual reality (IVR), is created. A typical IVR system contains both the intelligence-driven virtual reality and the physical reality, thus constructing an intelligence-driven mutually mirrored world. We propose the concept of IVR, and describe the details about the definition, structure and implementation of a typical IVR system. The parallel living environment is proposed as a typical application of IVR, which reveals that IVR has a significant potential to extend the human living environment.

Hand-based interaction is one of the most widely-used interaction modes in the applications based on optical see-through head-mounted displays (OST-HMDs). In this paper, such interaction modes as gesture-based interaction (GBI) and physics-based interaction (PBI) are developed to construct a mixed reality system to evaluate the advantages and disadvantages of different interaction modes for near-field mixed reality. The experimental results show that PBI leads to a better performance of users regarding their work efficiency in the proposed tasks. The statistical analysis of T-test has been adopted to prove that the difference of efficiency between different interaction modes is significant.