The ToolFinger: Supporting Complex Direct Manipulation in Virtual Environments
Abstract
Virtual environments (VEs) such as the Responsive Workbench were designed to support interactive, complex applications. The possibility of direct manual interaction with virtual objects, using both hands in a natural, intuitive way is one of the great advantages of such configurations. The related work on interaction techniques for these environments is mainly concentrated on hand-oriented, spatial manipulation. With increasing complexity of applications, application control issues become more relevant, including the problem of tool selection. In this paper, we propose a new interaction technique, optimized for handling tool selection tasks comfortably, called the ToolFinger. The ToolFinger is a hand held 3D widget, resembling a pen, to which a set of tools is assigned in a way that selecting and applying a tool are no longer two separated tasks. The ToolFinger concept allows a fluent integration of tool selections and tool switches with the workflow of geometry editing. It benefits complex manipulation tasks in applications such as immersive geometric modelling, or interactive visualisation.
BibTeX
@inproceedings {10.2312:EGVE:IPT_EGVE2003:039-046,
booktitle = {Eurographics Workshop on Virtual Environments},
editor = {Andreas Kunz and Joachim Deisinger},
title = {{The ToolFinger: Supporting Complex Direct Manipulation in Virtual Environments}},
author = {Wesche, Gerold},
year = {2003},
publisher = {The Eurographics Association},
ISSN = {1727-530X},
ISBN = {978-3-905674-06-4},
DOI = {10.2312/EGVE/IPT_EGVE2003/039-046}
}
booktitle = {Eurographics Workshop on Virtual Environments},
editor = {Andreas Kunz and Joachim Deisinger},
title = {{The ToolFinger: Supporting Complex Direct Manipulation in Virtual Environments}},
author = {Wesche, Gerold},
year = {2003},
publisher = {The Eurographics Association},
ISSN = {1727-530X},
ISBN = {978-3-905674-06-4},
DOI = {10.2312/EGVE/IPT_EGVE2003/039-046}
}