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Affordance as an Interactive Feature to Enhance Usability in Virtual Reality

Jiang, Shan, Rooney, Brendan and Lee, Hyowon orcid logoORCID: 0000-0003-4395-7702 (2025) Affordance as an Interactive Feature to Enhance Usability in Virtual Reality. In: 7th International Conference on Human-Computer Interaction, 22-27 June 2025, Gothenburg, Sweden.

Abstract
Although the use of Virtual Reality (VR) has been steadily increasing in diverse domains thanks to its unique characteristic of immersiveness, the platform is still struggling to enter the mainstream or ubiquitous arena. One of the culprits is the usability: many currently available VR applications exhibit a poor incorporation of design knowledge available in the field of Human-Computer Interaction (HCI). We posit that there are ways to improve the usability of VR applications by more explicitly taking design principles/guidelines into the design of actual interactivity. In this paper, we start exploring this direction by taking one of the most well-known design/usability principles, Affordance, as an explicit end-user feature in navigating a VR environment – this is by visually highlighting only those objects in the surrounding that can be approached and interacted with, so that the users will be aware of what objects they should focus on. We developed a full-fledged VR prototype where a typical household environment with a number of interactable and non-interactable objects are available; recognizing that any forms of highlighting will reduce the sense of immersiveness, the affordance on the interactable objects is only temporarily activated, either automatically in regular time intervals, or a controller button to switch on or off, or a user-maintained interaction in which the affordance is shown only while the user is holding down a controller button. A usability testing with 15 participants revealed a number of insights on how such an explicit incorporation of a design principle could improve the VR interaction.
Metadata
Item Type:Conference or Workshop Item (Paper)
Event Type:Conference
Refereed:Yes
Uncontrolled Keywords:VR, Human–computer interaction, User interface, Affordance
Subjects:Computer Science > Information technology
Computer Science > Interactive computer systems
Computer Science > Multimedia systems
Computer Science > Visualization
DCU Faculties and Centres:DCU Faculties and Schools > Faculty of Engineering and Computing > School of Computing
Research Institutes and Centres > INSIGHT Centre for Data Analytics
Research Institutes and Centres > d-real
Published in: Artificial Intelligence in HCI 7th International Conference, AI-HCI 2026, Held as Part of the 28th HCI International Conference, HCII 2026, Montreal, QC, Canada, July 26–31, 2026, Proceedings, Part I. LNCS 16744. Springer Nature.
Publisher:Springer Nature
Official URL:https://link.springer.com/book/10.1007/978-3-032-3...
Funders:Digitally-Enhanced Reality (d-real) under Grant No. 18/CRT/6224, Research Ireland Insight Centre for Data Analytics, SFI/12/RC/2289_P2
ID Code:31230
Deposited On:06 Oct 2026 14:18 by INVALID USER. Last Modified 06 Oct 2026 14:18
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