Disocclusion Headlight for Selection Assistance in VR

We introduce the disocclusion headlight, a method for VR selection assistance based on alleviating occlusions at the center of the user's field of view. The user's visualization of the VE is modified to reduce overlap between objects. This way, selection candidate objects have larger image footprints, which facilitates selection. The modification is confined to the center of the frame, with continuity to the periphery of the frame which is rendered conventionally. The selection assistance is provided automatically, without any interaction from the user. Furthermore, our method disoccludes without destroying the local spatial relationships between selection candidates, which allows solving complex selection queries based on the relative position of objects. We have tested our method on three selection tasks, where we compared it to two state-of-the-art VR selection techniques, i.e., the alpha cursor and the flower cone. Our method showed significant advantages in terms of shorter task completion times, and of fewer selection errors.