A Strategy to Present 2D Information within a Virtual Reality Application

There is no Virtual Reality (VR) without immersion. It is responsible for giving the user a sense of presence in the virtual environment. The idea is to provide the user with the feeling of "being there"! In spite of recent advances, there are still VR applications that demand text (or other 2D) information for system control. In this case, current systems apply 2D graphical components to achieve such purposes. Actually, they "leave" the virtual environment and presents the text requirement in a 2D interface, such as a Web page. Only after, the user is moved back within the virtual environment. However, this procedure strongly conflicts with a virtual environment application, since it reduces the feeling of presence in a 3D space. Therefore, the aim of this paper is to present a new strategy to provide the user with text control information, without the need to move to other 2D environment. The objective is to preserve VR such important feature: immersion.