Leap to the Eye: Implicit Gaze-based Interaction to Reveal Invisible Objects for Virtual Environment Exploration

Cinematic virtual reality (CVR) brings viewers a novel and immersive movie-watching experience. However, they may miss story events and scene transitions that the director has designed as key points hidden in the VR scene. In this paper, we introduce implicit gaze-based interaction for enhancing the exploration experience in CVR. In contrast to most research on gaze-based selection of objects or explicit guidance of attention using visual cues, we focus on implicit interaction that utilizes the user's natural gaze and attention to explore the scene. We design and implement different gaze trigger methods for implicit interaction, making the interaction more intuitive and natural when users reveal the invisible objects. We implemented the adaptive collider technique, offering users a better sense of exploration than raycasting and spotlight techniques. We have also conducted user studies to compare animation sequences for visual feedback, with each animation sequence offering different storytelling techniques. One of the sequences is better suited for describing spaces in the virtual world, while the other sequence offers users the feeling of constructing a world through their gaze.