The GlobeFish and the GlobeMouse

Abstract

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.

Mouse, Tactile, and Tangible Input for 3D Manipulation

“…We try to avoid this lack of generalizability by having a variety of participants and by using a task that is highly generalizable to 3D manipulation. We argue that this can be achieved by using a 3D docking task, which has often been used in the literature to evaluate new 6DOF devices [17,66], new interaction techniques [18], and for paradigm comparison studies [57] (for the latter, however, the docking was only conducted in two dimensions). We argue that using a low-level task such as 3D docking is the key to be able to generalize results from comparative studies.…”

“…The 3D docking task we employ comprises translation in 3 DOF, re-orientation in 3 DOF, and precise final positioning of 3D shapesactions similar to those that are common in and representative of interactive 3D data exploration. A docking task (see other examples of docking task studies; e. g., [7,17,18,22,66]) consists of bringing a virtual object to a target position with a target orientation. The docking target is shown on the screen as a wire-frame version of the manipulated object.…”

Happy Measure

“…Future research of ours will surely include a satisfying mapping of gestures on 2D surface onto object manipulation in 3D for the place mode. Finding appropriate interaction concepts for rotation and translation is a non-trivial task, as illustrated by (Froehlich, Hochstrate, Skuk, & Huckauf, 2006;Hancock et al, 2007), who both deal with stationary devices. For mobile devices, the issue may even be enhanced.…”

3D virtual reality vs. 2D desktop registration user interface comparison

“…They found that ergonomics and form-factor were important design aspects for user satisfaction, although their study was aimed at gathering qualitative results rather than quantitative performance measures. For their GlobeMouse and GlobeFish, Froehlich et al [ 24 ] separated position and rotation manipulation using a trackball (rotation) connected to an inner and outer frame (position). When tested against a commercial option in a study, they found that the completion times for their devices were significantly faster than for the commercial SpaceMouse, although they found a similarly strong learning effect for the three devices tested over the course of two sets of four tasks per device (with training sessions before each task).…”