Exploring Visualizations for Precisely Guiding Bare Hand Gestures in Virtual Reality

Bare hand interaction in augmented or virtual reality (AR/VR) systems, while intuitive, often results in errors and frustration. However, existing methods, such as a static icon or a dynamic tutorial, can only inform simple and coarse hand gestures and lack corrective feedback. This paper explores various visualizations for enhancing precise hand interaction in VR. Through a comprehensive two-part formative study with 11 participants, we identified four types of essential information for visual guidance and designed different visualizations that manifest these information types. We further distilled four visual designs and conducted a controlled lab study with 15 participants to assess their effectiveness for various single- and double-handed gestures. Our results demonstrate that visual guidance significantly improved users’ gesture performance, reducing time and workload while increasing confidence. Moreover, we found that the visualization did not disrupt most users’ immersive VR experience or their perceptions of hand tracking and gesture recognition reliability.