Dual Body Bimanual Coordination in Immersive Environments

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A common way to enable immersion in VR is to render a virtual body that mirrors the user's physical movements. VR allows us to design interaction schemes that go beyond direct avatar embodiments. In particular, there is a growing body of literature investigating the simultaneous control of multiple bodies in VR. We contribute to this literature by investigating the important case where multiple bodies perform a coordinated interaction with each other. Such actions directly question what kind of embodiment users experience. Concretely, we investigate people's abilities to perform coordinated bimanual selection and handoff tasks between a first-person and third-person body through a user study with 19 participants. Results provide quantitative \& qualitative evidence for people's ability to perform complex coordinated tasks through two bodies. Furthermore we characterize participant performance in different task and interaction configurations, summarize the strategies they employed, and discuss qualities of user's proprioception.