A Natural Interface for 3D Manipulation

3D interfaces enable a user to create and manipulate 3D objects in a computer-simulated 3-dimensional world. There are many existing interfaces, but few of them exhibit the naturalness which characterizes our interaction with actual 3D objects in the real world. Developing a natural 3D interface is increasingly becoming an area of interest. Researchers are exploring several techniques to help achieve naturalness in interaction, based on the analysis of hand gestures or on tangible devices. In this thesis, we investigate the use of a cheap and widely available commodity device to create a natural 3D user interface. The device that we use is not only cheap and available on the market, but it is also fast and allows 6DoF manipulation. Our focus is to create a one-to-one correspondence between positions in physical and virtual space. We calibrated the device to suit this purpose. Our interface is shown to be easy to use based on an experiment in which users perform a simple assembly task. The task was performed by subjects using our new interface and also by subjects in a control condition using a traditional mouse-based 3D interface. We recorded the participants completion time in both conditions and found a clear advantage for our interface. We conclude by describing some possible future directions to make this a better interface