Walk-up VR: virtual reality beyond projection screens

Today, VR research and development efforts often focus on the continual innovation of interaction styles and metaphors for virtual environments (VEs). New tools and interaction devices aim to increase the immersive experience rather than support seamless integration with real work scenarios. Even though users may soon perceive odours within VEs, real, task-oriented interaction within these environments will continue to lag behind. Combining these efforts can result in new user interfaces that reduce the cumbersome barriers prevalent in VEs today, finally unleashing the latent impact of this technology in everyday life. Implementing this vision requires an interdisciplinary and applied approach to integrate VR into the workplace. Mixed-reality display capabilities, useful multimodal interaction and perceptual, intuitive interfaces are major components of such an application-oriented and human-centered approach, for which we coined the term walk-up VR. The paper discusses augmented and virtual reality as contributing technologies