Testbed Evaluation of Virtual Environment Interaction Techniques

  • Authors:
  • Doug A. Bowman;Donald B. Johnson;Larry F. Hodges

  • Affiliations:
  • Department of Computer Science Virginia Polytechnic Institute & State University bowman@vt.edu;Graphics, Visualization, and Usability Center Georgia Institute of Technology donny@cc.gatech.edu;Graphics, Visualization, and Usability Center Georgia Institute of Technology hodges@cc.gatech.edu

  • Venue:
  • Presence: Teleoperators and Virtual Environments
  • Year:
  • 2001

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Abstract

As immersive virtual environment (VE) applications become more complex, it is clear that we need a firm understanding of the principles of VE interaction. In particular, designers need guidance in choosing three-dimensional interaction techniques. In this paper, we present a systematic approach, testbed evaluation, for the assessment of interaction techniques for VEs. Testbed evaluation uses formal frameworks and formal experiments with multiple independent and dependent variables to obtain a wide range of performance data for VE interaction techniques. We present two testbed experiments, covering techniques for the common VE tasks of travel and object selection/manipulation. The results of these experiments allow us to form general guidelines for VE interaction and to provide an empirical basis for choosing interaction techniques in VE applications. Evaluation of a real-world VE system based on the testbed results indicates that this approach can produce substantial improvements in usability.