Interacting with objects in a virtual reality environment is commonly performed with either hand held physical controllers or by using optical devices to track the orientation and posture of the user’s hands. Recent research finds that physical controllers often are preferred due to lack of accuracy of the hand tracking technology. As the Virtual Reality (VR) industry is constantly evolving, new improved solutions for hand tracking are developed and shipped with head mounted displays (HMD) at consumer level prices. Continuous research is needed in order to evaluate and refine recent findings within the field of interaction in virtual environments. New technologies that offer better tracking accuracy may very well address earlier findings where accuracy often was the reason for preferring physical controllers over hand tracking. 

This research project conducts a user study aiming to investigate and compare handheld controllers to hand tracking for object interaction in virtual reality in the context of a VR application developed for Oculus Quest, currently the most sold Virtual Reality headset on the consumer market. Participants are exposed to three tasks in a virtual reality application involving activities related to object interaction. The findings are similar to recent research. The original handheld controllers for the Oculus Quest 1 & 2 are preferred in terms of user experience and allow the users to be more efficient and accurate in the context of the VR application developed for this thesis project.