Hi! My name is Andrii Matviienko from Technical University of Darmstadt, Germany. I'm going to
present our work titled 'VRtangibles: Assisting Children in Creating Virtual Scenes using Tangible
Objects and Touch Input'. This work was conducted together with my colleagues Marcel Langer,
Florian Müller, Martin Schmitz and Max Mühlhäuser. The process of creating virtual worlds requires
a technical background, which restricts the user group of active virtual world creators
primarily to software developers. The issues of a technical barrier are particularly
challenging for children who are usually exposed to virtual reality as passive users
and miss an opportunity to become active creators. Although there has been a big body
of work done to facilitate children's entry point into technology using physical computing toolkits,
tangible and visual programming environments and wearable computing platforms, there has been
little to support children's active participation in creating virtual reality scenes. A good example
of physical manipulation in a virtual environment includes virtual bricks. It is a LEGO-based
toolkit that facilitates physical manipulation in VR by offering a set of feature breaks which
emulate and extend the capabilities of default controllers. Using this toolkit users can build
the proxy of a virtual object using LEGO bricks and operate a virtual object using its proxy.
In another toolkit called Tangi Feick et al. added more flexibility to the interaction with tangible
objects by introducing stretching and bending of 3D-printed objects in addition to translation
and rotation. In this work we aim to provide an intermediary step towards familiarization with
VR as active creators by allowing non-tech savvy users, e.g., children to create virtual scenes
playfully without writing a code and instead focus on creative expression. To facilitate the fun and
quick creation of virtual scenes, we develop a virtual environment where children can create
virtual scenes while being inside the virtual world. From the interaction perspective we have
employed two interaction techniques to facilitate direct manipulation of virtual objects known to
children from daily interaction: the first one is tangible input (from playing with toys) and
the second one touch input (from playing with smartphones). We combined the virtual space and
the interaction techniques in the system called VRtangibles, which includes a tablet, a set of
tangible objects and the virtual reality environment shown in the headset. Children
can create virtual scenes by placing tangible objects on the tablet while wearing VR glasses
and the virtual objects will instantaneously appear in the virtual world. In this video we
can see a person who locates a tangible object in the real world and place it on the tablet.
The objects instantaneously appear in the virtual world and can be further modified using the touch
input. The virtual world can be scaled and type and color of the objects can be changed. Another
object can be placed on the scene and its properties are modified using soft buttons.
For dynamic objects, in this case it is a car, a user can specify a trajectory using a touch input.
When the finger is released, a virtual car follows the trajectory. To validate the effectiveness of
the proposed system in facilitating children's familialization with virtual reality via hands-on
activities we collected preliminary findings from a user test with six children. We evaluated
VRtangibles in the lab experiment and compared it to the state-of-the-art tool called CoSpaces.
For the first task (a static setting) children had to create a virtual scene with two houses, two
trees and one car. For the second task (dynamic setting) children had to create a virtual scene
with three houses placed in the middle, two forests with three trees each to the left and
right sides from the houses and two cars in the front and behind the houses. After placing the
car children had to assign driving trajectories to it to bring them to movement. As a result we
found out the children were on average quicker in creating virtual objects with mouse and keyboard.
They had more fun interacting with VRtangibles compared to keyboard and mouse.
Moreover, children tend to use tangible objects more often when they solve a predefined task. So,
to sum it up, we can say that we see our work as a basis for familiarization with VR environment and
an approach to include non-tech savvy users in the active creation of virtual scenes. We aim
to further extend the idea of the proposed system by integrating tracking of children's hands using
off-the-shelf VR gloves and enable the creation of virtual models by scanning children's own toys
to facilitate personalized interaction. That was VRtangibles. Thank you for your attention.