Virtual environments (VEs) such as the Responsive Workbench were designed to support interactive, complex applications. The possibility of direct manual interaction with virtual objects, using both hands in a natural, intuitive way is one of the great advantages of such configurations. The related work on interaction techniques for these environments is mainly concentrated on hand-oriented, spatial manipulation. With increasing complexity of applications, application control issues become more relevant, including the problem of tool selection. In this paper, we propose a new interaction technique, optimized for handling tool selection tasks comfortably, called the ToolFinger. The ToolFinger is a hand held 3D widget, resembling a pen, to which a set of tools is assigned in a way that selecting and applying a tool are no longer two separated tasks. The ToolFinger concept allows a fluent integration of tool selections and tool switches with the workflow of geometry editing. It benefits complex manipulation tasks in applications such as immersive geometric modelling, or interactive visualisation.
展开▼
