Gaze + Pinch interaction in virtual reality

Virtual reality affords experimentation with human abilities beyond what’s possible in the real world, toward novel senses of interaction. In many interactions, the eyes naturally point at objects of interest while the hands skilfully manipulate in 3D space. We explore a particular combination for virtual reality, the Gaze + Pinch interaction technique. It integrates eye gaze to select targets, and indirect freehand gestures to manipulate them. This keeps the gesture use intuitive like direct physical manipulation, but the gesture’s effect can be applied to any object the user looks at - whether located near or far. In this paper, we describe novel interaction concepts and an experimental system prototype that bring together interaction technique variants, menu interfaces, and applications into one unified virtual experience. Proof-of-concept application examples were developed and informally tested, such as 3D manipulation, scene navigation, and image zooming, illustrating a range of advanced interaction capabilities on targets at any distance, without relying on extra controller devices.