EEBA: Efficient and ergonomic Big-Arm for distant object manipulation in VR

Abstract

Object manipulation is the most common form of interaction in virtual reality. We introduced an efficient and ergonomic Big-Arm method to improve the efficiency and comfort of manipulating distant objects in virtual reality. We prolong the upper arm and forearm lengths according to the maximum distance of the manipulation space and construct the linear mapping between the real and virtual elbow angle, which makes manipulation easier to control and more efficient. We propose an optimized elbow angle mapping to further improve the efficiency and comfort of distant object manipulation. Two user studies were designed and conducted to evaluate the performance of our optimized Big-Arm method. The results show that our method achieves significant improvement in efficiency, ergonomic performance, and task load reduction for manipulating the distant object (distance $\ge$6 m) compared to the state-of-the-art methods. At the same time, our method exhibits superior usability.