Maintaining Visibility Constraints for View Management in 3D User Interfaces

Abstract

Abstract. We present an approach to user interface design based on view management, in which the system and user manage graphical attributes of the user interface's components to maintain desired visual relationships. For example, we may wish to avoid having objects that are more important be occluded by objects that are less important. In 3D environments, this can involve the system maintaining visual constraints on the 2D projections of selected objects in the view plane to determine the objects' properties on the screen, such as position, size, and transparency. We describe a view-management component that addresses dynamically changing visibility relationships among moving objects, and apply it to 3D user interfaces, focusing on augmented reality systems, in which users wearing head-tracked, head-worn displays can view graphics overlaid directly onto the real world. To demonstrate some of the different ways in which the system and its users can exert control over what is seen in augmented reality, we show examples from our testbed systems. These examples include automatically laid out annotations that provide desired information about the surrounding environment, and a situation awareness aid whose display responds to the user's head movement.