LinkSpace: A Toolkit for Linked Spatial Views in Virtual Reality
Virtual reality (VR) applications often isolate users in a single immersive context, although many tasks require access to distant environments, locations, or perspectives. Prior work addresses this need through portals, transitions, overlays, split views, and spatial previews, but these approaches are usually implemented from ground up for their specific use-case, making design alternatives difficult to compare and prototype. We use the term linked spaces to refer to such interactive connections between two spaces or perspectives. Using this terminology to summarize recurring requirements in prior work, we derive a design space for linked spaces and present LinkSpace, a Unity toolkit for creating configurable linked spaces with stereoscopic rendering, traversal, teleportation, remote selection and grabbing, object transfer, and runtime management. We evaluated the toolkit in an exploratory workshop with 18 computer science students enrolled in a master's program who used it to design and implement their own linked space prototypes. Participants created diverse concepts, rated the toolkit's usability as good (SUS: 75.1, SD=8.1), and reported high perceived usefulness, adoption intention, and learnability, with qualitative feedback describing the toolkit as useful, flexible, simple, interesting, and intuitive.
Toolkit on GitHub