Three-dimensional widgets

Abstract

The 3D components of today's user interfaces are still underdeveloped. Direct interaction with 3D objects has been limited thus far to gestural picking, manipulation with linear transformations, and simple camera motion. Further, there are no toolkits for building 3D user interfaces. We present a system which allows experimentation with 3D widgets, encapsulated3D geometry and behavior. Our widgets are first-class objects in the same 3D environment used to develop the application. This integration of widgets and application objects provides a higher bandwidth between interface and application than exists in more traditional UI toolkit-based interfaces. We hope to allow user-interface designers to build highly interactive 3D environments more easily than is possible with today's tools.

Exploring individual user differences in the 2D/3D interaction with medical image data

“…In the tasks, participants had to manipulate so-called 3D widgets. Simply speaking, a widget is an object in a scene that responds to user events (e.g., mouse clicks) and data changes by corresponding changes in its appearance or behavior (Conner et al 1992). 3D widgets make the user interaction with 3D objects more intuitive by providing fast semantic feedback.…”

The Personal Interaction Panel – a Two‐Handed Interface for Augmented Reality

“…Basic object manipulation tasks, like object selection, transformation and on a higher level dragging and dropping of objects in three dimensions have been investigated by many research groups [Butt92], [Conn92]. In our setup, the pen alone is used for 3D pointing-, selection operations or direct manipulation of the displayed model, where a 6D mouse is normally used.…”

“…Six degree-of-freedom mice and data gloves or suites extend the possible set of interactions by adding nearly unconstrained three dimensional movement and capturing dozens of position and orientation data, but suffer either from unsatisfying low interaction bandwidth or an overloaded metaphor like complex gesture languages. Since no direct tactile feedback of the virtual objects is provided in most systems, inexperienced users feel disoriented first and find it rather difficult to work with flying buttons, menus, "3D widgets" [Conn92] and similar metaphors floating around them.…”

A multimodal virtual reality interface for 3D interaction with VTK

“…Picking is used to select objects in the visualization, while widgets are used to interact with objects in specific ways. A widget has a visual representation within the 3D visualization and defines the behavior that is executed when the widget is manipulated [5]. Simple examples of 3D widgets are the point widget for probing object information, the box widget for positioning, rotating, and scaling of objects, the spline widget for defining a spline by editing control points, etc.…”