3DTouch: A wearable 3D input device with an optical sensor and a 9-DOF inertial measurement unit

We present 3DTouch, a novel 3D wearable input device worn on the fingertip for 3D manipulation tasks. 3DTouch is designed to fill the missing gap of a 3D input device that is self-contained, mobile, and universally working across various 3D platforms. This paper presents a low-cost solution to designing and implementing such a device. Our approach relies on relative positioning technique using an optical laser sensor and a 9-DOF inertial measurement unit. 3DTouch is self-contained, and designed to universally work on various 3D platforms. The device employs touch input for the benefits of passive haptic feedback, and movement stability. On the other hand, with touch interaction, 3DTouch is conceptually less fatiguing to use over many hours than 3D spatial input devices. We propose a set of 3D interaction techniques including selection, translation, and rotation using 3DTouch. An evaluation also demonstrates the device's tracking accuracy of 1.10 mm and 2.33 degrees for subtle touch interaction in 3D space. Modular solutions like 3DTouch opens up a whole new design space for interaction techniques to further develop on.Comment: 8 pages, 7 figure

A new method for interacting with multi-window applications on large, high resolution displays

Physically large display walls can now be constructed using off-the-shelf computer hardware. The high resolution of these displays (e.g., 50 million pixels) means that a large quantity of data can be presented to users, so the displays are well suited to visualization applications. However, current methods of interacting with display walls are somewhat time consuming. We have analyzed how users solve real visualization problems using three desktop applications (XmdvTool, Iris Explorer and Arc View), and used a new taxonomy to classify users’ actions and illustrate the deficiencies of current display wall interaction methods. Following this we designed a novel methodfor interacting with display walls, which aims to let users interact as quickly as when a visualization application is used on a desktop system. Informal feedback gathered from our working prototype shows that interaction is both fast and fluid

An Arm-Mounted Accelerometer and Gyro-Based 3D Control System

This thesis examines the performance of a wearable accelerometer/gyroscope-based system for capturing arm motions in 3D. Two experiments conforming to ISO 9241-9 specifications for non-keyboard input devices were performed. The first, modeled after the Fitts' law paradigm described in ISO 9241-9, utilized the wearable system to control a telemanipulator compared with joystick control and the user's arm. The throughputs were 5.54 bits/s, 0.74 bits/s and 0.80 bits/s, respectively. The second experiment utilized the wearable system to control a cursor in a 3D fish-tank virtual reality setup. The participants performed a 3D Fitts' law task with three selection methods: button clicks, dwell, and a twist gesture. Error rates were 6.82 %, 0.00% and 3.59 % respectively. Throughput ranged from 0.8 to 1.0 bits/s. The thesis includes detailed analyses on lag and other issues that present user interface challenges for systems that employ human-mounted sensor inputs to control a telemanipulator apparatus