An exploration of menu techniques using a 3D game input device

Abstract

Existing work on menu techniques has shown linear menus to be less efficient and reliable for menuing tasks when compared to radial menus. With the rise in popularity of 3D spatial interaction in console gaming, such as the Nintendo Wii, it is important to determine whether the existing findings still hold true when using a 3D pointing device such as the Wii Controller. Linear menus were compared with two other menu techniques: radial menus and rotary menus. Effectiveness was measured through task completion time and the number of task errors. A subjective measure was also taken to determine participant preferences. Participants performed faster and made fewer errors when using the radial menu technique. Radial menus were also preferred by participants. These results indicate that radial menus are an effective menu technique when used with a 3D pointing device. This appears to agree with previous work regarding radial menus and indicates that the usage of radial menus in gaming applications should be investigated further.

3D Marking menu selection with freehand gestures

“…Menu selection in 3D games was investigated in [4] using a Wii remote. Different menu types including linear, radial and rotary were compared.…”

HoloBar: Rapid Command Execution for Head-Worn AR Exploiting Around the Field-of-View Interaction

“…World and body-referenced menus have the disadvantage of requiring the user to deviate his attention from the current task. To display the menu items, researchers have proposed a variety of 3 menu appearances, such as circular menus [59,28], radial menus [53,16], linear menus [16,19] or ring menus [23]. The appearance of the menu is usually linked to the input device or interaction technique used to interact with the menu.…”

Exploring the usefulness of finger-based 3D gesture menu selection

“…A similar result was obtained by Komerska and Ware [16] for their haptic menu system designed for Fishtank VR. Chertoff et al [7] designed a Nintendo Wiimote based menu system and found pie menus to be faster than linear lists. The results of all these studies are in line with Fitts's law [9], as pie layouts provide a smaller average distance to menu items.…”

“…Due to the availability of various unobtrusive motion sensing devices (e.g., Microsoft Kinect, Leap Motion, Creative Interactive Gesture Camera), many gesture based menu systems [4,7,10,24] have been explored both in academia and commercially in recent years. However, these menu selection methods are often slow (taking about 3-5 seconds) to perform and can suffer from accuracy problems making them less desirable compared to traditional keyboard-mouse or button based menu systems.…”