MoCon-VR: Motion Control in Mobile Virtual Realty Applications through Smartwatches

Abstract

The high processing capabilities of current smartphones and the availability of wearable Virtual Reality (VR) toolkits make it possible for normal users to use VR environments on go for gaming or learning. However, users normally need to use their head movement for interacting or moving the objects inside these VR environments. This can cause the dizzy and nauseas feelings amongst the users as well as neck/head muscle tiredness effect, which restrict them to use it for longer time. Targeting this problem, we propose to use the 3D accelerometer inside the current smartwatches. In this way, users would easily interact or control the movement inside the mobile VR environment through their wrist movement. For this purpose, we built MoCon-VR framework that provides the motion control in Google Cardboard-based mobile VR environment through smartwatch's 3D accelerometer sensor. A preliminary conducted study with 10 participants shows less dizzy and nausea feelings amongst the participants as well as less neck/head muscle pains, in compared to the standard head-movement-based approach. Virtual reality. Mobile devices. Mobile VR applications. Smartwatch. Google cardboard.