The theory of swarm control shows promise for controlling multiple objects, however, scalability is hindered by cost constraints, such as hardware and infrastructure. Virtual Reality (VR) can overcome these limitations, but research on swarm interaction in VR is limited. This paper introduces a novel Swarm Manipulation interaction technique and compares it with two baseline techniques: Virtual Hand and Controller (ray-casting). We evaluated these techniques in a user study ($N$ = 12) in three tasks (selection, rotation, and resizing) across five conditions. Our results indicate that Swarm Manipulation yielded superior performance, with significantly faster speeds in most conditions across the three tasks. It notably reduced resizing size deviations but introduced a trade-off between speed and accuracy in the rotation task. Additionally, we conducted a follow-up user study ($N$ = 6) using Swarm Manipulation in two complex VR scenarios and obtained insights through semi-structured interviews, shedding light on optimized swarm control mechanisms and perceptual changes induced by this interaction paradigm. These results demonstrate the potential of the Swarm Manipulation technique to enhance the usability and user experience in VR compared to conventional manipulation techniques. In future studies, we aim to understand and improve swarm interaction via internal swarm particle cooperation.

翻译：群体控制理论在控制多个对象方面展现出潜力，然而其可扩展性受到硬件与基础设施等成本因素的限制。虚拟现实（VR）能够克服这些限制，但VR中群体交互的研究尚不充分。本文提出了一种新颖的群体操控交互技术，并将其与两种基准技术——虚拟手与控制器（射线投射）进行了比较。我们通过用户研究（$N$ = 12）在三种任务（选择、旋转与缩放）和五种条件下评估了这些技术。结果表明，群体操控展现出更优的性能，在三种任务的大多数条件下速度显著更快。该技术显著降低了缩放尺寸偏差，但在旋转任务中引入了速度与精度之间的权衡。此外，我们通过后续用户研究（$N$ = 6）在两个复杂VR场景中应用群体操控技术，并借助半结构化访谈获得深入见解，揭示了优化的群体控制机制以及该交互范式引发的感知变化。这些结果证明，与传统操控技术相比，群体操控技术具有提升VR可用性与用户体验的潜力。在未来的研究中，我们旨在通过内部群体粒子协作来理解并改进群体交互。