3D Navigation

How to get around in 3D virtual environments? Walking is out, even in a full immersive environment. One solution is to map some kind of gesture to gesture to the motion of the viewpoint.

This is the device we call the Bat. Using it Ware and Osborne (1990) investigated various ways of mapping hand motion to viewpoint control. We found a "flying" metaphor to the the most flexible overall.Using hand displacement mapped to viewpoint velocity and orientation allowed people to rapidly navigate with both fine and course controlled motions.

Later we added both a predictor for enhanced control and visual feedback (Chapman and Ware, 1992) and we also showed that adjusting the speed based on the local context improved performance (Ware and Fleet, 1997).

References

Ware, C. and Fleet, D. (1997) Context Sensitive Flying Interface. 1997 Symposium on Interactive 3D Graphics, Provicence RI, April. Proceedings published by ACM SIGGRAPH, 127-130.

Chapman, D. and Ware, C. (1992) Manipulating the Future: Predictor Based Feedback for Velocity Control in Virtual Environment Navigation. Special Issue of Computer Graphics. Proceedings of 1992 Symposium on Interactive 3D Graphics, Cambridge Mass, 63-66.

Ware, C., and Slipp, L. (1991) Using Velocity Control to Navigate 3D Graphical Environments: A comparison of Three Interfaces, Proceedings of Human Factors Society Meeting San-Francisco, September. Proceedings, 300-304.

Ware, C. Using Hand Position for Virtual Object Placement. (1990). Visual Computer. 6: 245-253.

Ware, C. and Osborne, S. (1990) Explorations and Virtual Camera Control in Virtual Three Dimensional Enivronments. Computer Graphics. 24(2) 175-183.

Ware, C. and Jessome, D. (1988), Using the Bat: A Six Dimensional Mouse for Object Placement. IEEE Computer Graphics and Applications. November 8-6, 65-70.