Bridging the Gap Across Realities: Visual Transitions Between Virtual and Augmented Reality

Cross-Virtuality applications enabling users to move between different stages of Milgram’s reality-virtuality continuum are a rapidly growing field of research. Modern video see-through head-mounted displays allow users to switch between augmented and virtual reality without removing the headset. This enables for the first time a fluent transition between augmented and virtual reality. Based on insights from literature and preliminary experiments we designed and implemented four transitions: Fade, SimpleCut, TeleportBeam and Portal. These techniques were expected to represent the best suitable concepts for transitioning seamlessly between augmented and virtual reality. After incorporating results from a pre-study, the transition techniques were evaluated in a qualitative user study regarding user experience, simulator sickness, continuity and applicability. Participants were able to freely move between both realities during the study in an immersive analytics scenario for logistics data.
In the user study, users preferred Fade in a workplace setting due to its efficiency and simplicity when transitioning frequently between realities. The Portal technique was deemed visually exciting and suitable for infrequent transitions between realities that differ greatly.