Long-Term Evaluation Study of 12-DOF Input Devices for Navigation and Manipulation in 3D Environments

[abstract]

Navigation and Manipulation are two common interaction subtasks which both individually require up to six DOF (degrees of freedom). This thesis argues that bi-manual 12-DOF input devices can be an alternative to the typical combination of one 6-DOF input device and an ordinary mouse for controlling various subtask of a three-dimensional (3-D) application. The Cubic Mouse, the only commercially available 12-DOF input device as well as a new 12-DOF device family, the YoYo familiy offer 12 DOF and could be used for navigation and manipulation. These devices differ in many aspects, such as the way their DOF are distributed and accessed or whether they provide a tactile coordinate system or not and more. But it is essential to develop new evaluation strategies to measure performance of such highly complex devices that can take these differences in account. We developed a 12-DOF extended docking task that requires navigational control as well as object manipulation for successful task completion and thus allows to present the objects in the scenery as solid objects which was not possible with previous 6-DOF docking tasks. In a series of preliminary experiments carried out within a university research project initial results and experience were established. Due to the considerably high task difficulty there were hardly any distinct and significant results. The question is, is it possible to design an evaluation of 12-DOF devices in a way that produces valid and significant results? This thesis shows that by rethinking and reconsidering details of the evaluation procedure valuable and interesting results can be acquired, such as task completion times, learning behaviour, variability, analyses of simultaneously used across-subtask DOF and subjective data. The data acquired within this long-term study shows that the new YoYo devices outperform the Cubic Mouse, which is mainly due to the high level of DOF separation. The most interesting result is that simultaneous across-subtask DOF identified as intended interaction was shown to be a significant advantage for one of the YoYo devices although only performed by experienced users. A follow-up study showed that the devices perform as observed in the long-term study with changing output devices (monitor vs. large projection screen) and varying display modes (mono vs. stereo) and performance is equal for all modes of display and output devices.

[documents]

• Bachelor Thesis
• Thesis Presentation
• Presentation at Interact2005
• Video (mov, 20MB)
  
  

[contact]

• alexander.speed (at) mytum.de