Stephan Pölzl completes his Master’s studies

The Department of Informatics Systems congratulates Stephan Pölzl on his successful defence of his Master’s thesis and completion of his studies!

In his Master’s thesis “Investigating Users’ Mid-Air Spatial Memory” (supervised by David Ahlström) Stephan Pölzl explores the potential of in-air pointing as an input technique in head-mounted display settings and how well people can point at and select invisible targets located in the air in their surroundings. In Stephan’s user experiment, participants used a VR/AR head-mounted display and learned and memorized in-air target locations in repeated practice rounds. After the practice rounds, the participants had to point at and select the corresponding in-air locations without seeing the targets. On average, participants could estimate the correct (invisible) target locations with 10-12 centimetres accuracy.

Stephan Pölzl’s work and find­ings con­tri­bute to a better understanding of people’s (in-air) pointing abilities, which in turn can help when designing future pointing-based applications for head-mounted displays.