Quantifying the Effectiveness of Project-Based Editing Operations in Virtual Reality

With the rapid evolution of virtual reality solutions as general-purpose computing platforms, the ability of users to integrate their complete digital life into 3D spaces is becoming increasingly important. In this paper, we focus on ways to manipulate arrangements – or layouts – of 2D content in 3D spaces. We compare three different approaches to layout creation based on variations and combinations of previously proposed solutions. Through controlled experiments, we show that users can create content layouts with high accuracy and significantly less time if they can re-use already existing content layouts. These results support the idea that the effectiveness of virtual reality platforms as universal computing platforms can be improved by incorporating a 3D file system in which spatial dashboard layouts emerge as a central organizing concept.