First author. Co-authors: Kasper Hornbæk and Joanna Bergström.

Published at CHI 2022. 🏆 Best paper honorable mention award (top ~5% of papers).

I introduce OVRlap, an interaction technique that allows a user to look around in multiple distinct and distant locations at once from a first-person perspective. It accomplishes this by layering these distinct locations spatially on top of each other. To allow the user to visually and conceptually distinguish between the different locations, OVRlap features the idea of one active and many passive viewpoints. While the active viewpoint is opaque, the passive viewpoints are translucent. The active viewpoint can be switched, for example with controller input. This allows the user to perceive elements and spatially orient themselves across these multiple viewpoints.

In a user study, we find that OVRlap makes users significantly faster and move significantly less in object-collection and monitoring tasks in a sample VR environment. Subjective measures were comparable across conditions. However, users switch their viewpoint more times than they had to. Based on these findings, we discuss future improvements for the technique.

The concept of OVRlap came out of a series of rapid prototyping I did around the concept of being in multiple places at once. It was so exciting to discover OVRlap since it is quite crazy to me that it actually works given the relative visual complexity. The benefits in completion time and movement reduction speak for themselves.

Working on this project also drove home the many challenges of attempting to do world class science during an unprecedented global pandemic. Due to COVID lockdowns, the study was run remote and I had to both solo-develop the application to such an extent that it could run as a stand-alone product on the users’ private VR displays and handle deployment and data collection across long distances. This was challenging and rewarding. Unfortunately I also think it introduces a degree of bias in the results, since all participants were likely to have a lot of VR experience since they own a VR display and participate on an enthusiast forum. I think the subjective measures might differ somewhat with a less biased sample of participants.