イー エイミー,北村喜文
A Sophisticated Manipulation
Aid in a Virtual Environment
Abstract:Object interactions in virtual reality is a subject of much interest as we attempt to apply virtual reality techniques in real world problems. The approach taken for handling interactions between objects may vary greatly depending on the application. In this report we describe a general method to assist users in the manipulation of arbitrary virtual objects by controlling the graphical display of the objects to prevent their inter-penetration. Our manipulation aid method makes use of the intuitive phenomenon of magnetic attraction to constrain the degrees of freedom of an object during collision with other objects. The manipulation aid does not require predefined properties to be attached to objects because it can dynamically constrain objects by using collision output face pairs from a real-time collision detection algorithm. Several experiments were conducted to test the efficiency of the manipulation aid against other methods such as without interface aid, with collision cue, with real objects, and with different input devices. In all these cases the results show that the manipulation aid is able to assist the user to manipulate virtual objects more efficiently and with more ease. The proposed manipulation aid is shown to be intuitive, real-time, accurate, efficient, compatible with user input, able to handle different object interactions and independent of input device.