Investigating Creation Perspectives and Icon Placement Preferences for On-Body Menus in Virtual Reality

TL;DR

The impact of the creation process is investigated to highlight the importance of the creation process, uncover user preferences for on-body menu organization, and provide insights to guide the development of intuitive and effective on-body interactions within virtual environments.

Abstract

On-body menus present a novel interaction paradigm within Virtual Reality (VR) environments by embedding virtual interfaces directly onto the user's body. Unlike traditional screen-based interfaces, on-body menus enable users to interact with virtual options or icons visually attached to their physical form. In this paper, We investigated the impact of the creation process on the effectiveness of on-body menus, comparing first-person, third-person, and mirror perspectives. Our first study ($N$ = 12) revealed that the mirror perspective led to faster creation times and more accurate recall compared to the other two perspectives. To further explore user preferences, we conducted a second study ($N$ = 18) utilizing a VR system with integrated body tracking. By combining distributions of icons from both studies ($N$ = 30), we confirmed significant preferences in on-body menu placement based on icon category (e.g., Social Media icons were consistently placed on forearms). We also discovered associations between categories, such as Leisure and Social Media icons frequently co-occurring. Our findings highlight the importance of the creation process, uncover user preferences for on-body menu organization, and provide insights to guide the development of intuitive and effective on-body interactions within virtual environments.

Figures (7)

• Figure 1: Our fist on-body menu system comprises three components: a VR headset (i.e., Oculus Rift S), a camera for whole-body motion detection (i.e., Kinect v2), and an interactive VR interface. The Kinect detects users' bodily movements, and the system exchanges signals among the devices to facilitate user interaction.
• Figure 2: Results of IPQ (a), NASA-TLX (Mental and Physical Demands) (b), Enjoyment (c), Confidence in Memorability (d), and Creation Time (e) for the three techniques during the Creation Task, with '*' indicating $p < 0.05$.
• Figure 3: Results of Recall Time (a), Error Distance (b), and NASA-TLX (Mental and Physical Demands and Performance) (c) for three techniques during the Recall task, with '*' and '**' indicating $p < 0.05$ and $p < 0.01$, accordingly.
• Figure 4: The distribution of different categories of icons under different conditions in User Study 1. The x and y coordinates in this figure represent unit lengths in Unity.
• Figure 5: Heatmaps of icon distribution across areas, where each cell's intensity represents the count of icons, representing the relative frequency of categories across different areas.