Move’n’Hold: Scalable Device-Based Interaction for Mixed Reality Handheld Displays

While handheld displays provide a widely available, low-budget access to Mixed Reality, developing appropriate interaction techniques remains challenging. For example, one-handed touch- and gestures-based methods are prone to fatigue and occlusion issues and two-handed device-based techniques are constrained to small-range manipulations or their pre-defined thresholds limit user control. In this paper, we introduce Move’n’Hold – a universally applicable interaction paradigm for translating and rotating virtual objects solely through a handheld display’s movement and peripheral touch. Move’n’Hold combines direct mapping between device and object manipulations when only left-thumb-touch is applied with automated repetitions of these initial manipulations that are started or stopped when right-thumb-touch is added or released. Hence, our technique allows switching individually between natural manipulation for small, precise movements and continuous manipulation for large, coarse movements. Our evaluation revealed Move’n’Hold as an intuitive and easy-to-learn input technique for multidimensional object translations and rotations. The technique also provides high scalability in terms of the distance, direction, complexity, and speed of manipulation. At the same time, it supports different user preferences and interaction styles. Our results further show that learning translation prior to rotation enhanced the overall user experience.