🏅 Honorable Mention Award
Using supernumerary multi-arms to carry out complex tasks is becoming a popular research domain in application areas such as virtual reality and robotics. Understanding how users can collectively utilise extra arms together with their own to achieve shared goals is critically important to develop efficient supernumeraries. This paper presents results from an exploratory user study (n=14) to understand user strategies for simultaneous control and coordination of virtual and real arms in VR object manipulation tasks. We used a Wizard-of-Oz approach to simulate intelligent extra arms and collected qualitative data through think-aloud and semi-structured interviews. We also gathered quantitative data on task performance and embodiment. Results indicate participants adjusted control strategies based on task complexity and system intelligence, changing how they managed tasks, delegated to extra arms, and experienced embodiment. Utilising the findings, we propose guidelines to improve multi-arm interaction design in future systems.
Hongyu Zhou, Tom Kip, Yihao Dong, Andrea Bianchi, Zhanna Sarsenbayeva, and Anusha Withana. 2025. Juggling Extra Limbs: Identifying Control Strategies for Supernumerary Multi-Arms in Virtual Reality. To appear in the 2025 CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems (CHI ’25)