Object manipulation technique development and evaluation in desktop virtual environment

Object manipulation is one of the major operations in 3D graphical interaction. For existing high degree-of-freedom (DOF) manipulation techniques, most of them have shown to be more efficient or intuitive in their specific experiments. However, these experiments often ignored essential factors within practical usages. Such factors include accuracy, the variation in required precision, the duration of usage, etc. These reasons may partially explain that many experimentally successful 3D interaction techniques are still not widely used in the marketplace.;Based on previous experimental conditions and conclusions, I designed a series of manipulation techniques and corresponding experiments in order to develop manipulation techniques which are more intuitive/flexible than conventional methods that dominate the marketplace and also more suitable for longer duration usage with better precise control than existing typical techniques based on high DOF input devices.;I started my research from two extremes (low DOF input devices - high DOF input devices) and try to find a middle optimum location between the two which benefits advantages from the two extremes. I have developed two sets of object manipulation techniques for desktop environment. The first set is based on high DOF input devices, experimental evaluations revealed the advantages of bimanual controls; scaling down to match had faster completion times than scaling up operations; users preferred One-Handed with Two-Hand Scaling than Spindle+Wheel technique. The second set of object manipulation techniques contains three desktop based input devices. The result showed users preferred separated rotation and translation isotonic position control than the integrated pose (translation + rotation) control with isometric rate input. The data analysis also proved the technique with isotonic position control outperformed the technique with isometric rate control in the final control phase of the docking test. Besides, the final consecutive experiments investigated users' inclination about DOF separation and integration in different phases of the manipulation based on isotonic position control. The results revealed the advantage of integral control of translation with rotation and the benefit of separate control between pose and scaling.;The data analysis and qualitative summary from variations in hardware/software components and fundamental DOF control investigation showed guidelines for future development which could inform the design of further object manipulation techniques to improve efficiency and practical usage.