VRBox: A Virtual Reality Augmented Sandbox for Immersive Playfulness, Creativity and Exploration

Augmented sandboxes have been used as playful and educative tools to create, explore and understand complex models. However, current solutions lack interactive capabilities, missing more immersive experiences such as exploring the sand landscape from a first person perspective. We extend the interaction space of augmented sandboxes into virtual reality (VR) to offer a VR-environment that contains a landscape, which the user designs via interacting with real sand while wearing a virtual reality head-mounted display (HMD). In this paper, we present our current VR-sandbox system consisting of a box with sand, triple Kinect depth sensing, a virtual reality HMD, and hand tracking, as well as an interactive world simulation use case for exploration and evaluation. Our work explores the important and timely topics how to integrate rich haptic interaction with natural materials into VR and how to track and present real physical materials in VR. In a qualitative evaluation with nine experts from computer graphics, game design, and didactics we identified potentials, limitations as well as future application scenarios.