Comparative Analysis of Interaction Techniques in Virtual Reality

Virtual Reality is an emerging breed in technology. It is gaining an increasing amount of interest and considerable work is being done on it recently. A virtual environment without any user interaction can quickly lose users' interest. To make virtual environment more captivating, user interaction with virtual world is important. The paper reviews recent technologies and methods of human-computer interaction in the virtual environment. First a thorough examination of recent work done on different ways of interacting with virtual environment was carried out. Based on this review a variety of virtual reality interaction techniques were identified and then categorized into four major categories namely, haptic devices, gesture recognition, brain-computer interface, and gaze-based interaction. These techniques were evaluated against certain predefined parameter. An extensive analysis of the different techniques and their literature has led to a consolidated review that is presented in this paper.