First, let me introduce LeMo (Let's Move, or Lè Mō/乐摸 in Chinese). LeMo is a multi-player virtual environment (VE), in which two users can interact with virtual musical interfaces and create music together (Men & Bryan-Kinns, 2018). LeMo is designed and built by me, under the supervision of Dr. Nick Bryan-Kinns. In the process of designing and building LeMo, I was always striving to eliminate interaction that based on dialog-boxes, and use intuitional bare hand based interaction as much as possible. Today, in this post, I want to share some of my thoughts on design gestures to add and remove an object in virtual reality (VR).

In the real world, human cannot create nor terminate something out of thin air, what we called "creating" is actually "converting". However, VR enables human to create or remove virtual object out of thin air in VR. To make this unnatural ability as natural as possible is what I am gonna talk about next.

First, generating objects in VR. In the real world, objects usually start from nothing and then expand from small to large. So in LeMo, I tried to mimic this, as this is an experience users all have in real life and can be easily recalled and mapped into VR. In LeMo, users can simply move their hands together, pinch and stretch to create an object (music interface), see Figure 1. This idea was initially inspired and mostly came from a VR demo called Blocks (Leap Motion, 2016).