Navigation and manipulation in virtual environments may require up to six degrees of freedom each. Input devices with twelve or more degrees of freedom can avoid explicit changes between navigation and manipulation and may therefore perform well in certain situations. However, usability of already existing 12-DOF devices is still unclear. For evaluating such handheld devices, we developed an extended docking task based on docking tasks designed for examining the usability of 6-DOF devices. In addition to the usually investigated object manipulation, the task requires navigation. We compared docking performances of two 12-DOF devices, the CubicMouse and the YoYo. Additionally, performance with a newly developed 12-DOF input device, the SquareBone, was under study. The SquareBone, a variation of the YoYo idea combined with some potentially beneficial features of the CubicMouse, provides 2 * 6 elastic DOF which can be controlled simultaneously. The study revealed that the isotonic CubicMouse, although preferred by novice users, was outperformed by the elastic SquareBone and the YoYo. The new SquareBone was shown to bear the potential of becoming superior to the YoYo, possibly because it enables simultaneous control of the 2*6 DOF.
We introduce two new six degree of freedom desktop input devices based on the key concept of combining forceless isotonic rotational input with force-requiring elastic translational input. The GlobeFish consists of a custom three degrees of freedom trackball which is elastically connected to a frame. The trackball is accessible from the top and bottom and can be moved slightly in all spatial directions by using force. The GlobeMouse device works in a similar way. Here the trackball is placed on top of a movable base, which requires to change the grip on the device to switch between rotating the trackball and moving the base.Our devices are manipulated with the fingertips allowing precise interaction with virtual objects. The elastic translation allows uniform input for all three axes and the isotonic trackball provides a natural mapping for rotations. Our user study revealed that the new devices perform significantly better in a docking task in comparison to the SpaceMouse, an integrated six degrees of freedom controller. Subjective data confirmed these results.
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