Cone&Bubble: Evaluating Combinations of Gaze, Head and Hand Pointing for Target Selection in Dense 3D Environments

Target selection is an essential task in virtual reality (VR), but can be challenging when targets are small or in dense environments. In this work, we present Cone&Bubble techniques for easy selection of targets. Our techniques rely on two modalities for selection, one for rough candidate selection and one for precise final selection. The user first points with an area cursor to select candidate objects. The user then points with the second modality via the bubble cursor mechanism, which identifies the nearest target to the pointing ray. We investigate our technique with gaze, head, and controller pointing and compare the effect of each modality on each pointing role. Our results show that gaze pointing is most suitable for quick candidate selection and that controller pointing allows for easy direction changes and granular pointing for final selection. Head was the least performant modality due to its slow and strenuous nature.