Identifying applications which are appropriate to the higher performance but higher cost virtual environment (VE) interface is a non-trivial problem. A VE application should not only demonstrate better cost/performance than it's non-immersive windows and mouse (WM) based alternatives, it must also address the time and effort required by the end user in becoming immersed. Identifying promising problem domains requires clearly understanding the theoretical advantages of the VE interface as well as the hardware specs necessary to best implement those advantages. This paper identifies a series of common tasks requiring varying degrees of viewpoint movement, object selection and manipulation and subjectively compares theoretical implementations between a VE interface having two depth cursors and a WM interface. Each task is intended to highlight fundamental operations where either WM performance begins to degrade, increased command sets leads to loss of generality or there is a justifiable requirement for presence which cannot be provided. These performance issues balanced by the current realities of VE technology are used to suggest a point when certain problem domains solution should move to a VE implementation and when they should remain WM.
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