Concert: Elementary VR Interactions Augmented By Bimanual Input

Abstract

Many elementary tasks in Virtual Reality (VR)—such as pointing, locomotion, and command selection—are still predominantly performed through unimanual interaction, even though the non-dominant hand often remains available. When these tasks require multiple sequential steps, their frequent use can increase overall interaction time and user effort. By engaging both hands in complementary roles, some of these tasks can be streamlined into more efficient, parallelized actions without sacrificing intuitiveness. This thesis, Concert, investigates how bimanual input can optimize such underexplored opportunities through three novel interaction techniques. The first, Conductor, is an intersection-based 3D pointing method where the dominant hand controls an aiming ray while the non-dominant hand positions an intersecting plane to determine cursor depth. Compared to Raycursor, a state-of-the-art VR pointing technique, Conductor enables faster and more accurate target selection. The second project, Fly The Moon To Me (Locomoontion), extends Conductor to 3D object manipulation for locomotion, integrating vertical (height) and horizontal (planar) adjustments into a single fluid operation. Users generate a preview copy of a target object, reposition it precisely in 3D space, and then align the original object and surrounding environment to the preview. In a teleportation task, Locomoontion outperformed Point & Teleport and Point & Tug, reducing completion time and physical effort. The third project, Drum Menu, accelerates command selection through bimanual shortcuts inspired by marking menus. Users select commands by joystick rotation, stroke drawing, or directional pointing, with the bimanual variant granting simultaneous access to two menu levels. In user studies, bimanual configurations were faster than unimanual ones for a 4-item layout, with participants preferring the bimanual joystick menu; however, 8-item layouts increased error rates among experienced users. Collectively, these studies show that many common VR tasks can be made more efficient through carefully designed bimanual interaction, providing concrete design guidelines for integrating both hands into future immersive systems.