ReachPad: Interacting with Multiple Virtual Screens using a Single Physical Pad through Haptic Retargeting

The advancement of Virtual Reality (VR) has expanded 2D user interfaces into 3D space. This change has introduced richer interaction modalities but also brought challenges, especially the lack of haptic feedback in mid-air interactions. Previous research has explored various methods to provide feedback for interface interactions, but most approaches require specialized haptic devices. We introduce haptic retargeting to enable users to control multiple virtual screens in VR using a simple flat pad, which serves as a single physical proxy to support seamless interaction across multiple virtual screens. We conducted user studies to explore the appropriate virtual screen size and positioning under our retargeting method and then compared various drag-and-drop methods for cross-screen interaction. Finally, we compared our method with controller-based interaction in application scenarios.