Swarm Manipulation in Virtual Reality

The theory of swarm control shows promise for controlling multiple objects, however, its scalability is limited by costs, such as hardware and infrastructure needs. Virtual Reality (VR) can overcome these limitations, but research on swarm interaction in VR is limited. This paper introduces a novel Swarm Manipulation interaction technique and compares it with two baseline techniques: Virtual Hand and Controller (ray-casting). We evaluated these techniques in a user study (N = 12) in three tasks (selection, rotation, and resizing) across five conditions. Overall, our results show that the swarm manipulation technique did result in good performance, exhibiting significantly faster speeds compared with at least one of the other two techniques across most conditions for these three tasks. Furthermore, this technique notably reduced resizing size deviations in the resizing task. However, we also observed a tradeoff between speed and accuracy in the rotation task. The results demonstrate the potential of the Swarm Manipulation technique to enhance the usability and user experience in VR compared to conventional manipulation techniques. In future studies, we aim to understand and improve swarm interaction, user control, and internal particle cooperation.