Domain-Specific Design of 3D Interaction Techniques: An Approach for Designing Useful Virtual Environment Applications

Abstract

Few production virtual environment (VE) applications involve complex threedimensional (3D) interaction. Our long-term collaboration with architects and engineers in designing 3D user interfaces (3D UIs) has revealed some of the causes: existing interaction tasks and/or techniques are either too generic when isolated from the application context, or too specific to be reusable. We propose a new design approach called domain-specific design (DSD) that sits between the generic and specific design approaches, with an emphasis on using domain knowledge in 3D interaction techniques. We also describe an interaction design framework encompassing generic, domain-specific, and application-specific interaction tasks and techniques. This framework can be used by designers to think of ways to produce domain-specific interaction techniques. We present a particular DSD method, and demonstrate its use for the design of cloning techniques in a structural engineering application.Results from empirical studies demonstrate that interaction techniques produced with domain knowledge in mind outperformed other techniques by improving task efficiency, work flow, and usefulness of the 3D UI.

Interaction for Immersive Analytics

“…Their studies show that gestures can outperform mouse interaction in rotation tasks. Chen et al designed a set of numerical input techniques to model architectural modeling process [34], ranged from virtual sliders [35] to virtual keypad and gestural input [33]. Hybrid interfaces that combine 2D multi-touch and 3D gestural interaction have been examined by Benko et al [12].…”

How to design compelling Virtual Reality or Augmented Reality experience?

“…However, a distinction should be made between the methods used to design virtual reality systems as a whole, which is the subject of our article, and methods for interfacing virtual reality systems (3D User Interface design) which have been subject to numerous scientific studies: in particular the work of Chen & Bowman [8].…”

Building novel Web3D user interfaces

“…Chen [Chen and Bowman 2009] introduced a usability engineering process for 3D UIs that is tuned toward specific user tasks in specific application domains. This process led us through several rounds of 'Activity Design', 'Information Design' and 'Interaction Design' to arrive at the feature set and user interface in the SAFAS v1.5 release.…”