A comparative study on user performance in the Virtual Dressmaker application

We report on a user study, investigating the efficiency of user interaction in a Virtual Reality application compared to 3D desktop applications.The Virtual Dressmaker is a Virtual Reality application for virtual cloth design, assembly, and simulation that supports advanced 6DoF interaction techniques. We conjecture that these interaction techniques are more natural for the users and lead to faster and more precise results than common desktop applications.In our user study we investigate interaction tools for positioning garment patterns in VR and compare the results to interaction with common 3D desktop applications. We measure completion time and precision of the positioned patterns and evaluate the subjective impressions of the users.The results show that Virtual Environments, and the presented interaction tools in particular, provide a valuable method for cloth design and assembly. Moreover, certain features of current 3D desktop design tools can be exploited for further improvements of VR interaction.