Arradar: Arrow and Radar Driven HMD-based Visual Guidance in Limited Field-of-View

It is a challenge to make users understand the scene and guide users to perform goal-oriented actions in virtual reality (VR) and augmented reality (AR) environments. This requires adequately providing users with location and distance information of all virtual objects in the scene. However, current head-mounted displays (HMDs) have limited field of view (FoV) and cannot display virtual objects comprehensively. In addition, complex virtual/augmented reality environments can exist with a large number of virtual objects that may be distributed outside of users’ FoV. Users have to spend more efforts to find virtual objects outside of their FoV without a clear and straightforward guidance methods. In this paper, we propose a new visual guidance approach, Arradar, for guiding users to search for virtual objects outside of the FoV in HMD-based virtual/augmented reality environments. The proposed approach is based on existing advanced methods, providing direction and distance information to users. We design an object collection scenario to evaluate our approach against existing techniques. To better understand the impact of different visual guidance technologies on users, we analyze the impact of all technologies on two operations (Teleport, Snapturn) in virtual reality. The evaluation results show that our approach can guide users better by achieving lower tasks completion time.