Enabling interaction with arbitrary 2D applications in virtual environments

Virtual environments (VE) provide immersive experiences that allow users to perceive and interact with three dimensional (3D) content. Yet, the 3D applications are often tailored for specific tasks and hardware setups such as a virtual or augmented reality (VR/AR) head mounted display (HMD). This limits the range of available content, because not every standard application (e.g. web browser, calender, office) that is available on a 2D desktop PC can be easily accessed using VR or AR. As commonly used by other systems, we capture arbitrary 2D windows from a desktop PC and display them as a 2D surface in the VE. Furthermore, we provide different techniques that aim to allow easy and fast interaction with the 2D applications in VR. For example, the work bench tool allows to copy and paste subsections of a 2D window. The copied sections are fully interactable and can be moved around and scaled to provide easy access to small menus. With the macro tool, users can create shortcuts to frequently used functions that are executed by cursor presses or hotkeys. The provided tools yield new ways of interacting with 2D interfaces. By allowing the user to easily interact with already available 2D applications, the productivity of VEs increases strongly.