- Hi everyone.
My name is Mark McGill
and I'm here to talk about our TOCHI paper,
Expanding the Bounds of Seated Virtual Workspaces.
So, this is my desk at work,
back when we were still able to go outside
and travel to our workplaces.
And here I have multiple large displays,
with different orientations
as well as multiple devices and peripherals.
All to enable me to
theoretically multitask more efficiently.
Now this kind of multi-monitor space
does have some problems.
So it presents a physical barrier to the world,
preventing me from interacting with my other colleagues
in the office.
The displays are not easily adjustable.
I am solely limited to how many physical displays I have
and they are ergonomically problematic
so e.g. they are difficult to position.
However the future has now finally caught up with us
and we can have V-R and A-R headsets
that are sufficiently capable of rendering virtual displays.
They're both wide and legible for the first time.
The benefits of virtual displays are that fundamentally
we can manipulate the virtual display
or apps in ways that are difficult
or impossible to do physical displays.
The question then is
what manipulations are worthwhile?
So for example, to enhance usability,
ergonomics or efficiency.
And notably wide virtual workspaces may lead
to excessive head or neck movement
with content not easily or comfortably reachable.
Now this can lead to an increase
in musculoskeletal disorders.
So our focus is on
whether we can improve the ergonomics and usability
of these wide virtual workspaces.
Our approach was to explore different techniques
for counter-rotating these displays around the user
based on implicit inputs.
So namely head orientation changes
or the end result being
that they could access a wide display space
and a narrower range or head motion.
Across two studies
we explore how we can beneficially alter the mapping
between head orientation and display position,
and whether implicit control of display position
is preferable to explicit user control
and no control at all.
We tested both three and five display horizontal workspaces
and a variety of different mappings
based on rotational gain.
And the mapping you can see here
was the most successful we tested.
Counter-rotating displays
as you cross the boundary between them
giving the appearance of displays sliding into view.
Counter-rotations made viewing peripheral displays
more comfortable,
particularly compared to the absence
of any assistance in viewing.
And they were preferred by users,
particularly for the instant transitions
based on display boundaries
and for the three displays over the five displays.
In study two,
we wanted to test the validity of these improvements
in a real functional workspace
with greater ecological validity
and explore the utility of implicit control
versus explicit control over the display position.
For study two
we iterated upon the best assistance technique
from study one
and implemented a fully functional virtual workspace,
with three virtual Windows desktops,
as well as the positionally tracked keyboard,
the Logitech Mixed Reality keyboard
and mouse enacted via a trackpad
allowing for equivalent interactivity
to a standard non-V-R workspace.
Participants performed a holiday planning task,
motivating full use of the three virtual displays
across three conditions.
Condition one was our control condition.
so it was three displays fixed in a virtual space
and users would manually look at these displays.
Condition two gave users keyboard shortcuts
for shifting the displays left or right
in 60 degree increments
replicating
something like virtual desktop management in Windows.
And condition three the boundary switching
was an iteration on our best ranked technique
from study one,
allowing for implicit control of display position
based on gaze.
So as the user's gaze
reached the boundaries of each display,
this would trigger a transition to the next nearest display
effectively shifting displays
as they looked left or right.
Again I'll just briefly
cover some highlights in the results.
Broadly T-L-X performance was improved
for having the boundaries shifting implicit approach
and users preferred this kind of assistance as well.
So over two studies,
we demonstrated the utility of dynamically manipulating
the display position based on head and neck movement.
So wide display spaces were made more comfortable
and more accessible to users
allowing their use within a comfortable ergonomic envelope
of neck movement.
Broadly, we argue that virtual displays
give us an opportunity,
not just to present more content,
but to present it in ways
that also better take into account ergonomics
and the ability,
the range of motion of an individual
and adapt to changes in our context
or posture and even our position.
(keyboard clatter)
That was our TOCHI paper
on Expanding the Bounds of Seated Virtual Workspaces
and it was in collaboration with Logitech as well.
Thank you very much.