Beyond the Blink: Investigating Combined Saccadic & Blink-Suppressed Hand Redirection in Virtual Reality

In pursuit of hand redirection techniques that are ever more tailored to human perception, we propose the first algorithm for hand redirection in virtual reality that makes use of saccades, i.e., fast ballistic eye movements that are accompanied by the perceptual phenomenon of change blindness. Our technique combines the previously proposed approaches of gradual hand warping and blink-suppressed hand redirection with the novel approach of saccadic redirection in one unified yet simple algorithm. We compare three variants of the proposed Saccadic & Blink-Suppressed Hand Redirection (SBHR) technique with the conventional approach to redirection in a psychophysical study (N = 25). Our results highlight the great potential of our proposed technique for comfortable redirection by showing that SBHR allows for significantly greater magnitudes of unnoticeable redirection while being perceived as significantly less intrusive and less noticeable than commonly employed techniques that only use gradual hand warping.