Redirected reach in virtual reality: Enabling natural hand interaction at multiple virtual locations with passive haptics

In many virtual reality applications, it would be ideal if users could use their physical hands to directly interact with virtual objects while experiencing realistic haptic feedback. While this can be achieved via interaction with tracked physical props that correspond to virtual objects, practical limitations can make it difficult to achieve a physical environment that exactly represents the virtual world, and virtual environments are often much larger than the available tracked physical space. Our approach maps a single physical prop to multiple virtual objects distributed throughout a virtual environment. Additionally, our work explores scenarios using one physical prop to control multiple types of object interactions. We explore considerations that allow physical object manipulation using orientation resetting to physically align the user with a physical prop for interaction. The resetting approach applies a discrete positional and rotational update to the user's location when the user virtually approaches a target for interaction, and the redirected reach approach applies a translational offset to the users virtual hand based on the positional difference of the virtual and physical objects.