Before hands disappear: Effect of early warning visual feedback method for hand tracking failures in virtual reality

Mucahit Gemici, Vrushank Phadnis and Anil Ufuk Batmaz

PLOS ONE, 2025, vol. 20, issue 6, 1-28

Abstract: Virtual hand representation in Head-Mounted Displays (HMDs) offers immersive and intuitive interactions in Virtual Reality (VR). However, current hand tracking algorithms are prone to errors, which can disrupt the user experience and hinder task performance. This paper presents a novel method for providing users with visual feedback when the quality of hand tracking decreases. Our approach employs a notification modal that warns users of potential failures. We identified three common hand tracking failure scenarios and evaluated the effectiveness of our method in two distinct VR tasks: object manipulation and complex assembly tasks. Results show that our early warning system reduces task completion time, lowers hand-tracking failures by up to 83%, decreases errors, improves system usability, and reduces cognitive load. This work contributes to the development of more robust and user-friendly VR HMD applications by enhancing hand tracking reliability, usability, and workload.

Date: 2025
References: View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
https://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal.pone.0323796 (text/html)
https://journals.plos.org/plosone/article/file?id= ... 23796&type=printable (application/pdf)

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:plo:pone00:0323796

DOI: 10.1371/journal.pone.0323796

Access Statistics for this article

More articles in PLOS ONE from Public Library of Science
Bibliographic data for series maintained by plosone ().