Sign in the Air to Unlock: An Interface for authentication in Virtual and Augmented Reality Powered by Point-Voxel Cross-Attention Network

Neda Abdolrahimi, Thiru Siddharth, Frank Sicong chen, Vir V Phoha

Significant advancement of immersive technologies such as Virtual and Augmented Reality (VR/AR) and their integration into diverse aspects of modern life need authentication interfaces that are secure, intuitive, and compatible with embodied interaction. Traditional methods such as passwords, PINs, and device-based logins, break immersion and rely on external hardware. Recent 3D-specific behavioral approaches, such as hand-gesture, eye-tracking, and electroencephalography (EEG)-based methods, offer promising alternatives but often require specialized sensors or constrain natural movement, limiting usability in dynamic environments. We present Sign in the Air to Unlock, an in-air signature interface that enables users to authenticate by signing naturally in 3D space which is a familiar, personal, and reproducible gesture. To realize this interface, we design a point-voxel Cross-Attention Network (PV-Net) that jointly models local motion dynamics and global spatial structure from 3D trajectories. The model is evaluated on two datasets: the public DeepAirSig dataset (1,800 signatures from 40 users) and ImmAirsig, a new dataset collected using Meta Quest 2 in immersive VR (880 samples from 22 users). PV-Net achieves an Equal Error Rate of 2.5% on DeepAirSig and 76% classification accuracy on ImmAirSig. These findings highlight the potential of 3D behavioral interfaces for seamless, user-centric authentication that merges security with natural interaction in immersive environments.