Dynamic 3D Magnifying Lenses for Manipulation and Navigation in an Immersive Virtual Environment

摘要

Immersive virtual environments present users with a rich experience that can be used for a number of applications. However, the transition from the desktop metaphor to the virtual one results in a paradigm shift for the user. What was once trivial thanks to the multitude of keys on the keyboard or the pseudo-analog freedom of a mouse wheel now becomes an effort of moving complicated, high degree of freedom input devices and motion trackers. To assuage this problem, it is important to develop interfaces for an immersive environment that can become as intuitive to use as the window-based interfaces of desktops. In this paper, we present one such interface that focuses on locating and manipulating remote objects. The interface automatically determines when a user is focusing on a distant object and distorts the environment to bring this object into the range of the user, who can then manipulate it as if he was standing next to it. To determine its effectiveness, this interface was evaluated against three other well known interaction techniques - direct manipulation, Go-Go hand, and HOMER. Testing showed that the lens interface was superior in accuracy to the others, but it took more time to complete a given task.