Portal Rendering and Creation Interactions in Virtual Reality

Transformative portals are a novel technique for supporting visualizations and interactions between locations that are not co-located in virtual reality (VR). We are interested in improving upon current portal rendering for VR, and supporting VR users to create new portals quickly and accurately. In this paper, we introduce a new high-level algorithm for rendering transformative portals in VR and present the benefits of our approach. By leveraging single-pass stereo and stencil portal rendering, we developed our algorithm to support multiple portals with "infinite" recursion, while running performant on mobile VR devices. We then benchmarked our performance against other common portal rendering implementations. In addition, we focused our research on VR interactions for handheld portals, in which the initial placement of the portal's destination is imperative to its effectiveness. In this paper, we present four new portal creation interactions for handheld portals: fishing reel, raycast with fishing reel, marker, and projectile curve. Based on existing research, we also established standard controls for fine-grained portal manipulation. In a user study, we compared and evaluated how well the creation interactions performed and argue that projectile curve is the most suitable general-purpose technique.