Using Velocity Control to Navigate 3D Graphical Environments: A comparison of Three Interfaces
Abstract
Three velocity control interfaces to three dimensional virtual environments are compared. The interface devices are: a six degree of freedom position sensor, a six degree of freedom isometric joystick, and a conventional mouse in conjunction with a soft control panel displayed on the monitor. In each interface the devices are used to control velocity, and all make use of a quadratic function to map the input to the viewpoint velocity. We use two structured exploration tasks to assess the usability of the different interfaces. In the first task an interviewing technique is used in conjunction with an exploration task which involved examining widely spaced details of the 3D scene. The second task is designed to reveal how well users can interact at different scales using the different devices. Subjects are required to navigate through a tube which varies over four orders of magnitude in size. The results show that subject's behavior is highly constrained by the local size of the tube: they maintained a constant velocity relative to the local size of the tube. They also showed differences in the effectiveness of the different devices in determining traversal rate that the positioning device and the control panel were about equally effective for fast navigation, and both are better than the isometric joystick.
Department
Center for Coastal and Ocean Mapping
Publication Date
9-1991
Volume
35, Number 5
Journal Title
Human Factors and Ergonomic Studies (HFES)
Pages
300-304
Conference Date
Sep 2 - Sep 6, 1991
Publisher Place
San Francisco, CA, USA
Publisher
Sage Publications
Digital Object Identifier (DOI)
10.1177/154193129103500513
Document Type
Conference Proceeding
Recommended Citation
C. Ware and L. Slipp, "Using velocity control to navigate 3D graphical environments: A Comparison of three interfaces," Proceedings of the Human Factors and Ergonomics Society Annual Meeting, vol. 35, no. 5, pp. 300–304, Sep. 1991.