Traversing Dual Realities: Investigating Techniques for Transitioning Digital Objects between Desktop and Augmented Reality Environments

Best Paper Award at ACM CHI 2025

Description:

Desktop environments can integrate augmented reality (AR) head-worn devices to support 3D representation, visualizations, and interactions in a novel yet familiar setting. As users navigate across the dual realities—desktop and AR—a way to move 3D objects between them is needed. We devise three canonical transition techniques based on common approaches in the literature and evaluate their usability and practicality in a controlled study (N=18). After refining both our transition techniques and the surrounding technical setup, we validate the applicability of the overall concept for real-world activities in an expert user study (N=6). In it, computational chemists followed their usual desktop workflows to build, manipulate, and analyze 3D molecular structures, but now aided with the addition of AR and facilitated by our transition techniques. Based on our findings from both user studies, we provide recommendations and guidelines for the design of 3D object transition techniques in desktop + AR environments.

Paper download: (8.8 MB)

Additional material:

We make several items of additional material available in the following repository: doi: 10.18419/DARUS-4755.

Software:

The source code is available at ithub.com/KoehnLab/chARpack.

Videos:

paper video:

pre-recorded presentation video for ACM CHI 2025:

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Pictures:

(these images as well as others from the paper that are our own are available under a CC-BY 4.0 license, see the license statement at the end of the paper)

Reference:

Tobias Rau, Tobias Isenberg, Andreas Koehn, Michael Sedlmair, and Benjamin Lee (2025) Traversing Dual Realities: Investigating Techniques for Transitioning Digital Objects between Desktop and Augmented Reality Environments. In Phoebe Toups-Dugas, Bongshin Lee, and Marshini Chetty, eds., Proceedings of the SIGCHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems (CHI, April 26–May 1, Yokohama, Japan). ACM, New York, 2025. Received a Best Paper Award at ACM CHI 2025, to appear.

BibTeX entry:



@INPROCEEDINGS{Rau:2025:TDR,
  author      = {Tobias Rau and Tobias Isenberg and Andreas Koehn and Michael Sedlmair and Benjamin Lee},
  title       = {Traversing Dual Realities: Investigating Techniques for Transitioning Digital Objects between Desktop and Augmented Reality Environments},
  booktitle   = {Proceedings of the SIGCHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems (CHI, April 26--May 1, Yokohama, Japan)},
  OPTeditor   = {Phoebe Toups-Dugas and Bongshin Lee and Marshini Chetty},
  year        = {2025},
  publisher   = {ACM},
  address     = {New York},
  doi         = {10.1145/3706598.3713949},
  doi_url     = {https://doi.org/10.1145/3706598.3713949},
  preprint    = {https://doi.org/10.48550/arXiv.2504.00371},
  github_url  = {https://github.com/KoehnLab/chARpack},
  url         = {https://tobias.isenberg.cc/p/Rau2025TDR},
  url2        = {https://charpack.github.io/},
  pdf         = {https://tobias.isenberg.cc/personal/papers/Rau_2025_TDR.pdf},
}

This work was done at and in collaboration with the Institute for Theoretical Chemistry and the Institute for Visualization and Interactive Systems of the University of Stuttgart, Germany.