Interaction in an immersive virtual reality application

Immersive VR (virtual reality) applications usually require styles and devices of human-computer interaction other than the conventional ones like mouse and keyboard, as the user typically wears a head-mounted display and does not see his/her real environment. Moreover, such interaction is usually threedimensional. This is where relatively new (or at least previously not dominant) paradigms come into the picture: natural user interface (NUI) and gestures. The paper overviews some definitions for these and discusses the communicative aspects of gestures. The abovementioned paradigms affect the process of interaction design, which has to be even more thorough, more conscious than before. If we use gestures for input, the actual requirements of the application have to be analyzed in detail and decision about gesture “vocabulary” has to be taken. In the paper, an actual implementation under development is discussed: the interaction - consisting of navigation in 3D space and manipulation of virtual objects - in an immersive VR application simulating the conventional control room of a nuclear power plant. The implementation is touchless, using a hand movement detector.