Move away or bring close in VR interaction

How to move objects in VR away or close to me if my controller doesn't support it?

Hello again! Today I'm going to tell you about an interaction I did during my final project, which allowed me to edit a scene with objects using virtual reality glasses. The glasses used for this application are not the glasses that are now trending, but the old ones that allowed you to use a mobile to see them, for example, Samsung Gear VR or Oculus Go. These glasses came with a controller that allows you to interact with the environment. As this controller has few buttons, I decided to use a radial menu to perform many actions (someday I will tell more about this type of menu because I love them!)

One of the actions that you could do in my application was to move an object wherever you want. In VR, the most common interaction for moving an object is holding the trigger button, so I wanted to keep this to take advantage of the familiarity and real-life likeness of the interaction to make it more intuitive. The problem with these controllers is that their movement is limited by 3 degrees of freedom (3DOF), so moving an object away from or closer to you is not as easy as in more modern glasses, where you can just move your hand in front of you. After thinking a lot about how I could bring closer or move away objects easily and intuitively, I ended up implementing this solution, which consists of taking advantage of the radial menu that I had already created to show two buttons that would allow us to bring closer or move away an object while holding it with the trigger. When pressing the button, the object will move correspondingly +/- 1 meter, because I didn't need much precision.

I opted for this solution and I was lucky enough to be able to test it in person with 5 real users and none of them had a problem moving the objects. In other applications, I have not seen this type of simple interaction, but they play with rotation angles, even some official Oculus tutorial offers it, so it seemed interesting for me to share it with you to help you in your projects.

I hope you liked it and encourage you to browse VR interactions, which are not as simple as they may seem!

(Controller pictures credit to Samsung).