An Omnidirectional Virtual Desktop Environment Using HMDs and Its Evaluation

Abstract

This manuscript attempts to expand work space with the basic idea of omnidirectional virtual desktops. HMDs are used to expand work space. Users wear the HMD and look around to see it. Application windows can be placed all around the user virtually and their positions are represented in the world coordinate system. Their positions are transformed in the HMD coordinate system then these windows are shown on the HMD screen. Our system requires less room to work as compared with multi-display systems that take up much more room. From a pilot experiment in target search tasks, the result showed that users tended to look for the target in a spiral way and locate them in about 19 seconds. © Springer International Publishing Switzerland 2014.