Direct manipulation and the third dimension
Max Möllers, Patrick Zimmer, Jan Borchers · 2012
Recent advances in touch and display technologies are supporting a wide-spread use of touch-based direct manipulation techniques as well as 3D displays that give a perspectively correct view. Both techniques have consistency constraints including the following: With direct manipulation, a dragged object should stick to the finger tip. With viewer centered projection, head movement should update the scene's projection to preserve a sound 3D impression, e.g., leaning around a house should reveal its backyard. Unfortunately, these two contradict each other, making a combination, e.g., moving the head while touching or dragging an object, non-trivial. We introduce a design space of perspectively adjusted methods for direct manipulation to cope with this limitation, select nine different strategies from it, and evaluate six of them in depth. Participants dragged a box through a 3D maze with multiple, partially occluded levels. We identified one method to be among the fastest while yielding up to 32% less collisions than the other fast methods.