Manipulation performance in interactive virtual environments

We have studied manipulation performance in virtual environments using two types of controllers: virtual hand control and 3D mouse-cursor control. These manipulation methods were tested under monoscopic and stereoscopic viewing conditions. Participants were asked to discriminate, grasp, pitch, roll and position virtual objects. Both speed and accuracy of manipulation tasks were meas-ured. Virtual hand control proved to be significantly faster and more accurate than 3D mouse-cursor control. Virtual hand control affected more head movement which was available in both conditions. Further, it was shown that the speed and accuracy of manipulations strongly improve under stereo-scopic viewing conditions