Drawing, writing, and painting on 2D surfaces in VR offers arbitrary interaction with virtual canvases of unlimited size. We propose Redirected Drawing, a novel methodology that applies visual manipulation to the user's drawing movement in VR to expand the perceived surface size required for the drawing experience. To this end, this study specifically explores translation gain manipulation, where the displacement of a drawing stroke in reality is simply multiplied by a gain to represent it in VR. Our results show that pen-based drawing on a physical surface allows for a gain of up to 1.16 without being noticed by the user, which is more suited to expanding a virtual canvas size than finger-based drawing on a physical surface or in mid-air.

This research was accepted for a paper at the top virtual reality conference, IEEE Virtual Reality and 3D User Interfaces, held in Saint-Malo, France in March 2025, and was presented orally.