Ruge’s Week 12 Summaries
Exploring 3D Navigation: Combining Speed-coupled Flying with Orbiting
This paper is broken into two separate tasks. The fist is to provide a basic taxonomy of current navigation and interface techniques used for selection navigation and control of the orientation and position within a virtual environment. The second task was using this new taxonomy, discuss a few new possible navigation and position methods that the researches felt would be positive improvements on those that came before.
Many new techniques were presented: Ghost copy, users manipulate a copy of themselves with the object. inverse fog/scales, objects are scaled. World Compression, changing occlusion of other objects. Rubberneck Navigation, possessing other objects.
The technique focused most on, speed-couple flying with orbiting, allows users to easily gain a larger angle of the scene as well. The speed at which the user is controller the character is allow bound to the camera elevation, when the users is moving fast the camera moves up and away giving the users a wider view of the scene when moving quickly.
The second experiment sought to prove combined more flying techniques to the motion to provide a more familiar motion to the system to add a gliding motion to the camera motion. Most experiments supported positive results. I would guess that many different approaches would work well, if used in the right scenario, and done correctly.
A Survey of Design Issues in Spatial Input
This paper documents a list of design principals and issues all designers should consider and be familiar with when designing interfaces for virtual environments. The paper not only does a brief job of listing them, but also explains the importance in very clear terms. Although it doesn’t specifically address it; it is very easy to draw the relationship between different aspects from the various components.
An aspect I am glad is approached is the human aspect. With virtual technology it is easy to fall victim to the ‘because we can’ complex. Technology gives us almost limitless freedom in virtual environments to make almost magical interfaces and fantastic environments. This problem will only grow as technology grows and becomes cheaper. Designers can easily forget that people need to use the environments, and do so comfortably.
Something that this paper doesn’t discuss that i feel is interesting, is the relevancy of these principals to 3d content developers as well as interface developers. Just as UI principals are important for computer programmers the principals are important for all 3d programmers and all people show will be involved with working with virtual environments.
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