Hand Interfaces: Using Hands to Imitate Objects in AR/VR for Expressive Interactions

Augmented reality (AR) and virtual reality (VR) technologies create exciting new opportunities for people to interact with computing resources and information. Less exciting is the need for holding hand controllers, which limits applications that demand expressive, readily available interactions. Prior research investigated freehand AR/VR input by transforming the user’s body into an interaction medium. In contrast to previous work that has users’ hands grasp virtual objects, we propose a new interaction technique that lets users’ hands become virtual objects by imitating the objects themselves. For example, a thumbs-up hand pose is used to mimic a joystick. We created a wide array of interaction designs around this idea to demonstrate its applicability in object retrieval and interactive control tasks. Collectively, we call these interaction designs Hand Interfaces. From a series of user studies comparing Hand Interfaces against various baseline techniques, we collected quantitative and qualitative feedback, which indicates that Hand Interfaces are effective, expressive, and fun to use.