Institute for IDEAS

Institute for Immersive Designs, Experiences, Applications, and Stories

TickTockRay

Using smartwatches for mobile VR interaction.

TickTockRay

TickTockRay is a smartwatch-based raycasting technique designed for smartphone-based head-mounted displays. It demonstrates that smartwatch-based raycasting can be reliably implemented on an off-the-shelf smartphone and may provide a feasible alternative for specialized input devices. 

We released TickTockRay to the research community as an open-source plugin for Unity along with an example application, a Minecraft VR game clone, that shows the utility of the technique for placement and destruction of Minecraft blocks.

Publications:

  • Daniel Kharlamov, Brandon Woodard, Liudmila Tahai, and Krzysztof Pietroszek. 2016. TickTockRay: smartwatch-based 3D pointing for smartphone-based virtual reality. In Proceedings of the 22nd ACM Conference on Virtual Reality Software and Technology (VRST ’16). ACM, New York, NY, USA. DOI: https://doi.org/10.1145/2993369.2996311
  • Krzysztof Pietroszek and Daniel Kharlamov. 2016. TickTockRay: Smartwatch Raycasting for Mobile HMDs. In Proceedings of the 2016 Symposium on Spatial User Interaction (SUI ’16). ACM, New York, NY, USA, 181-181. DOI: https://doi.org/10.1145/2983310.2989184