SeeThroughBody: Mitigating Occlusion through Body Transparency to Enhance Foot-Floor Touch Interaction

Occlusion, often caused by the user’s body or fingers, can significantly reduce the efficiency and usability of touch interfaces. As foot-based interactions in HMDs become more prevalent, self-occlusion becomes a more pronounced issue due to the involvement of the body and legs. This work presents SeeThroughBody, a body-rendering approach designed to mitigate occlusion and enhance touch interactions between the foot and interactive floor in virtual environments. Our user study unveiled twofold results. First, changing VisualizationStyles and BodyPartsVisibility can improve objective performance (e.g., time, movement) by reducing occlusion. Second, these modifications also affect the subjective user experience (e.g., embodiment, usability). Different VisualizationStyles and BodyPartsVisibility have varying impacts, presenting trade-offs between performance and experience. Based on these insights, we recommend Transparent-Foot and Outline-Foot for interactions focused on efficiency, and Transparent-All and Transparent-Thigh for enhancing overall user experience. Finally, we demonstrate the application of these recommendations in a map browsing scenario using foot touch.