A survey of plasticity in 3D user interfaces

International audiencePlasticity of 3D user interfaces refers to their capabilities to automatically fit to a set of hardware and environmental constraints. This area of research has already been deeply explored in the domain of traditional 2D user interfaces. Besides, during the last decade, interest in 3D user interfaces has grown. Designers find with 3D user interfaces new ways to promote and interact with data, such as e-commerce websites, scientific data visualization, etc. Because of the wide variety of Virtual Reality (VR) and Augmented Reality (AR) applications in terms of hardware, data and target users, there is a real interest in solutions for automatic adaption in order to improve the user experience in any context while reducing the development costs. An adaptation is performed in reaction to different criteria defining a system such as the targeted hardware platform, the user's context and the structure and the semantic of the manipulated data. This adaptation can then impact the system in different ways, especially content presentation, interaction techniques modifications and eventually the current distribution of the system across a set of available devices. We present the state of the art about plastic 3D user interfaces. Moreover, we present well known methods in the field of 2D user interfaces that could become relevant for 3D user interfaces. With this survey, we show that current solutions do not meet all plasticity requirements. That is why we propose an action plan to meet these requirements