See what I see: Concepts to improve the social acceptance of HMDs

Virtual Reality is reaching into the consumer space. Mobile virtual reality solutions are nowadays widely available and affordable for many smartphones, by adding a case with attached lenses around the phone to create a head-mounted display. While using these in public places or at social gatherings where the head-mounted display is given around to others, it can lead to problems regarding social acceptance, as the surrounding people are not aware of what the virtual reality user is seeing and doing. We address this problem by adding a second, front-facing screen to the head-mounted display. We build and evaluate two prototypes for this usage.