A handle bar metaphor for virtual object manipulation with mid-air interaction

Commercial 3D scene acquisition systems such as the Microsoft Kinect sensor can reduce the cost barrier of realizing mid-air interaction. However, since it can only sense hand position but not hand orientation robustly, current mid-air interaction methods for 3D virtual object manipulation often req...

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Bibliographic Details
Main Authors: Song, Peng, Goh, Wooi Boon, Liu, Xiaopei, Hutama, William, Fu, Chi-Wing
Other Authors: School of Computer Engineering
Format: Conference or Workshop Item
Language:English
Published: 2013
Subjects:
Online Access:https://hdl.handle.net/10356/96996
http://hdl.handle.net/10220/13156
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Institution: Nanyang Technological University
Language: English
Description
Summary:Commercial 3D scene acquisition systems such as the Microsoft Kinect sensor can reduce the cost barrier of realizing mid-air interaction. However, since it can only sense hand position but not hand orientation robustly, current mid-air interaction methods for 3D virtual object manipulation often require contextual and mode switching to perform translation, rotation, and scaling, thus preventing natural continuous gestural interactions. A novel handle bar metaphor is proposed as an effective visual control metaphor between the user's hand gestures and the corresponding virtual object manipulation operations. It mimics a familiar situation of handling objects that are skewered with a bimanual handle bar. The use of relative 3D motion of the two hands to design the mid-air interaction allows us to provide precise controllability despite the Kinect sensor's low image resolution. A comprehensive repertoire of 3D manipulation operations is proposed to manipulate single objects, perform fast constrained rotation, and pack/align multiple objects along a line. Three user studies were devised to demonstrate the efficacy and intuitiveness of the proposed interaction techniques on different virtual manipulation scenarios.