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As virtual reality overlays the user’s view, challenges arise when interaction with their physical surroundings is still needed. In a seated workspace environment interaction with the physical surroundings can be essential to enable productive working. Interaction with e.g. physical mouse and keyboard can be difficult when no visual reference is given to where they are placed. This demo shows a combination of computer vision-based marker detection with machine-learning-based hand detection to bring users’ hands and arbitrary objects into VR.

Inputting text fluently in virtual reality is a topic still under active research, since many previously presented solutions have drawbacks in either speed, error rate, privacy or accessibility. To address these drawbacks, in this paper we adapted the predictive text entry system "Dasher" into an immersive virtual environment. Our evaluation with 20 participants shows that Dasher offers a good user experience with input speeds similar to other virtual text input techniques in the literature while maintaining low error rates. In combination with positive user feedback, we therefore believe that DasherVR is a promising basis for further research on accessible text input in immersive virtual reality.

The design of optical lens assemblies is a difficult process that requires lots of expertise. The teaching of this process today is done on physical optical benches, which are often too expensive for students to purchase. One way of circumventing these costs is to use software to simulate the optical bench. This work presents a virtual optical bench, which leverages real-time ray tracing in combination with VR rendering to create a teaching tool which creates a repeatable, non-hazardous, and feature-rich learning environment. The resulting application was evaluated in an expert review with 6 optical engineers.

Since the beginning of the design and implementation of virtual environments, these systems have been built to give the users the best possible experience. One detrimental factor for the user experience was shown to be a high end-to-end latency, here measured as motionto-photon latency, of the system. Thus, a lot of research in the past was focused on the measurement and minimization of this latency in virtual environments. Most existing measurement-techniques require either expensive measurement hardware like an oscilloscope, mechanical components like a pendulum or depend on manual evaluation of samples. This paper proposes a concept of an easy to build, low-cost device consisting of a microcontroller, servo motor and a photo diode to measure the motion-to-photon latency in virtual reality environments fully automatically. It is placed or attached to the system, calibrates itself and is controlled/monitored via a web interface. While the general concept is applicable to a variety of VR technologies, this paper focuses on the context of CAVE-like systems.