A handle bar metaphor for virtual object manipulation with mid-air interaction

  • Authors:

  • Peng Song;Wooi Boon Goh;William Hutama;Chi-Wing Fu;Xiaopei Liu

  • Affiliations:

  • Nanyang Technological University, Singapore, Singapore;Nanyang Technological University, Singapore, Singapore;Nanyang Technological University, Singapore, Singapore;Nanyang Technological University, Singapore, Singapore;Nanyang Technological University, Singapore, Singapore, Singapore

  • Venue:
  • Proceedings of the SIGCHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems
  • Year:
  • 2012

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Abstract

Commercial 3D scene acquisition systems such as the Microsoft Kinect sensor can reduce the cost barrier of realizing mid-air interaction. However, since it can only sense hand position but not hand orientation robustly, current mid-air interaction methods for 3D virtual object manipulation often require contextual and mode switching to perform translation, rotation, and scaling, thus preventing natural continuous gestural interactions. A novel handle bar metaphor is proposed as an effective visual control metaphor between the user's hand gestures and the corresponding virtual object manipulation operations. It mimics a familiar situation of handling objects that are skewered with a bimanual handle bar. The use of relative 3D motion of the two hands to design the mid-air interaction allows us to provide precise controllability despite the Kinect sensor's low image resolution. A comprehensive repertoire of 3D manipulation operations is proposed to manipulate single objects, perform fast constrained rotation, and pack/align multiple objects along a line. Three user studies were devised to demonstrate the efficacy and intuitiveness of the proposed interaction techniques on different virtual manipulation scenarios.