Rubbing Interaction with Two-Handed Virtual Reality Controllers

As a common action in our daily lives, rubbing has been a viable technique for various devices, including touchscreens, digital pens, and skin surfaces. However, there has been little research on the design of rubbing in virtual reality (VR), particularly with VR controllers. This study explores the design space of rubbing with two-handed VR controllers. We started with a one-on-one interview with 10 participants to understand four components of rubbing with VR controllers: hand use, rubbing direction, device type and rubbing contact. In Experiment 2, we proposed a method to classify rubbing with three hand uses and six rubbing directions. Results showed that the overall classification accuracy reached 96%. Experiment 3 revealed that our method was able to successfully reject all seven tested non-rubbing actions. Results from Experiment 4 reflected user preference for using our technique to perform five typical VR tasks. Our study contributes to VR interaction design with controllers.