In-Depth Mouse: Integrating Desktop Mouse into Virtual Reality

Virtual Reality (VR) has potential for productive knowledge work, however, midair pointing with controllers or hand gestures does not offer the precision and comfort of traditional 2D mice. Directly integrating mice into VR is difficult as selecting targets in a 3D space is negatively impacted by binocular rivalry, perspective mismatch, and improperly calibrated control-display (CD) gain. To address these issues, we developed Depth-Adaptive Cursor , a 2D-mouse driven pointing technique for 3D selection with depth-adaptation that continuously interpolates the cursor depth by inferring what users intend to select based on the cursor position, the viewpoint, and the selectable objects. Depth-Adaptive Cursor uses a novel CD gain tool to compute a usable range of CD gains for general mouse-based pointing in VR. A user study demonstrated that Depth-Adaptive Cursor significantly improved performance compared with an existing mouse-based pointing technique without depth-adaption in terms of time (21.2%), error (48.3%), perceived workload, and user satisfaction.