Combining bimanual interaction and teleportation for 3D manipulation on multi-touch wall-sized displays

Abstract

While multi-touch devices are well established in our everyday life, they are currently becoming larger and larger. Large screens such as wall-sized displays are now equipped with multi-touch capabilities. Multi-touch wall-sized displays will become widespread in a near future in various places such as public places or meeting rooms. These new devices are an interesting opportunity to interact with 3D virtual environments: the large display surface offers a good immersion, while the multi-touch capabilities could make interaction with 3D content accessible to the general public. In this paper, we aim to explore touch-based 3D interaction in the situation where users are immersed in a 3D virtual environment and move in front of a vertical wall-sized display. We design In(SITE), a bimanual touch-based technique combined with object teleportation features which enables users to interact on a large wall-sized display. This technique is compared with a standard 3D interaction technique for performing 6 degrees of freedom manipulation tasks on a wall-sized display. The results of two controlled experiments show that participants can reach the same level of performance for completion time and a better precision for fine adjustments of object position with the In(SITE) technique. They also suggest that combining object teleportation with both techniques improves translations in terms of ease of use, fatigue, and user preference.