Towards a Practical Virtual Office for Mobile Knowledge Workers

Key Takeaways

the concept of the office as we know it is changing more people are working in locations farm from the office or while on the move well this transition can induce many positive effects such as enabling flexible hours and reducing commute time it does require workers to work in environments that might be less than optimal from a small desk in the home to a makeshift workspace on the go with limited space and no privacy another major change is the plurality of devices that user employed today from the desktop pc and laptops to ultramobile phones and tablets limited in their input space and display sizes in recent years vr technology has been progressed by lip and bounce head mounted devices have become light cheap supporting high resolution displays they can use inside out tracking which requires no special setups of the user environment enable optical hand tracking and support video pass-through for occasional interaction with the external world we suggest a novel immersive workspace that enables the user to work in a large variance of real physical environments we direct a design space at the use of large display space but at the same time small physical space that limits the input to the physical devices used by the user such as a tablet improved headset sensing enables better understanding of the real world around the user multiple headsets today already offer hand tracking as well as access to the camera streams which can be used to track the touch screen of the tablet or the laptop virtual reality enables a very large display space around the user many virtual applications use corresponding large input space however the physical work environment may be sub-optimal and limited in free space also large gestures do require a lot of effort and are hard to maintain for a long time to enable the user to work a full day and reduce the exhaustion we expect the user to do small gestures using supported hands on the tablet or the laptop by designing interaction for a small input space the user may be able to keep his familiar working gestures and muscle memory in many different physical environments in past works we look at how can users use existing devices such as keyboards to effectively work in vr since the virtual environment is not bound by the limitation of the physical world it is possible to retarget the user hands from the desk to be closer to the user view to minimize the user's effort or change the way the hands looks to increase the keyboard visibility and even to change the input devices according to the context of the application enabling typing of password while securing the typing from prying eyes or minimizing mode switches while enabling rich input from the keyboards we continue to explore the ways that virtual reality display and sensing may make users work more efficient and let them work regardless of the physical condition around them virtual reality enables the use of space around the screen for enhanced visualization and using new 3d interaction techniques for around and above the screen which allows manipulating data beyond the bounds of the physical touch screen or to uncover hidden dependencies in the data please relate to the paper for details