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Week 11 Summary

By on March 25th, 2013

Pop Through Button Devices for VE Navigation and Interaction

The paper describes a novel class of virtual reality input devices that combine pop through buttons with 6 DOF trackers. Following characteristics of pop through devices can be used to improve virtual environment interaction. Twice as many activation states available in the same physical surface area. A bare minimum of additional physical activity is required to activate the additional state.  The physical activity of popping through one button state to another is more natural than pressing separate buttons would be.

The paper describes two input devices namely FingerSleeve and TriggerGun. The FingerSleeve device mounts two small pop through buttons on an elastic frame, with the tracker placed on the back of the sleeve. The TriggerGun device houses two pop through buttons mounted on a modeling clay frame. One is placed on the front to be used as a trigger, and the other is placed on top for thumb activation.

In order to understand the capabilities of these devices a couple of techniques like LaserGrab and ZoomBack were implemented. In Zoomback the user is translated towards the target point on pressing the button and is brought back to his original position on releasing the button.In LaserGrab the user moves relative to the object. The relative distance between the users head and hand is used to determine his distance from the object in VE.

The paper also describes CavePainting using pop through devices, it claims that using pop through devices is better than the use of Pinch glove. Such devices help to achieve improve functionality and solve the ergonomic problems of the older system.

Weekly Paper Summaries Comments turned off

[week 11 summary]

By on March 25th, 2013

Pop Through Button Devices for VE Navigation and Interaction

A class of virtual reality input devices is put forward in this paper. These virtual reality input devices combine pop through buttons to address the challenge of increasing the number of interaction modes without utilizing more complicated and obtrusive devices. Two different presentations, the FingerSleeve and TriggerGun, are discussed and analyzed specifically.

The pop through button contains two buttons. By pressing lightly or firmly on the button’s surface, it can achieve clearly distinguished activation states. Compared to traditional button, pop through button has characteristics like twice as many activation states, minimum requirement for physical activity and more natural for activating inherently sequential. Those advantages can help to improve virtual environment interaction.

The TriggerGun is a holdable device with two pop through buttons, one triggered by the index finger and another triggered by the thumb. Those two buttons are separately designed to suite the natural movement character of each finger.

The FingerSleeve is a wearable device. An elastic fabric with plastic sewn onto it can snuggly fit the index finger for most users. The pop through buttons are glued on the plastic with carefully designed shape, size and position.

Tasks for exploring and evaluating the impact of pop through devices are discussed. The ZoomBack technique allows user to navigate in a virtual environment. By lightly pressing a button, the user is translated directly toward the target he points to, while by lightly releasing the button, the user is returned to the original location. If the user presses firmly, the translation will be kept even after the button is released. The LaserGrab technique allows user to navigate with regard to the relative distance between the user’s head and hand. Additionally, an orbital mode is activated by hard pressing on the button. Snapshot technique helps the user to easily take snapshot with pop through buttons. A cropping widget is invoked by pressing lightly and then, after adjusting, a harder pressing will take a snapshot of area within the frame. From all those three applications, we can see that the principle of mapping between behaviors and pop through buttons are very natural and effective. The user feed back also proves no difficulty of adapting and controlling this new device.

To better evaluate the device functionality, a real application with pop through device modification is designed and implemented. Compared to the old official design, the CavePainting with pop through devices can support the original functionality equivalent to that of Pinch glove, achieve extra functionality and avoid many of the ergonomic problems.

I like this design a lot. Since it is easy to manipulate and capable of handling multiple choices with simple operations. I am wondering if there is more application or area that this device can be extended to.