Research On Three-dimensional User Interfaces And Three-dimensional Interaction Techniques

With the improvements of hardware and software and increasing application requirements, the computer-centered WIMP(Windows, Icons, Menu, Pointer) interaction paradigm has showed many shortcomings such as narrow interaction bandwidth complex grammar and "small screen effect" which limit its further development. During 1990s, the next generation user interface was proposed. As one of its main interaction style, three-dimensional user interface gets more and more attention due to its naturalness and intuition. However, it brings user interface a radical change. At present, there are no standard devices interaction techniques interface metaphor design methods and design tools for 3D user interfaces. The need of some help from other research fields also makes it a difficult research field. Most of the research work is focus on interaction technique and less emphasis is put on utilizing human's characteristics and mining space clues in real world. There is not a complete and systemic design tool. All of above limits show that there exists much work to do for 3D user interfaces. In this thesis, the author aims at research on three-dimensional user interfaces and three-dimensional interaction techniques.This thesis first analyses three main features of 3D user interfaces and puts forward its hierarchical model. After discussed two-handed interaction and pen-based 3D interaction, it proposes a design tool for rapid development of 3D user interfaces. Three software prototypes are developed for validation its theories methods and techniques. The research can be seen as the basis work of 3D user interfaces.In the theoretic level, this thesis performs the analysis and description for the common interaction characteristics of 3D user interfaces and proposed its hierarchical model. These basic theories can help to find the essence of 3D user interfaces and give some theoretic guidelines for design tools. In the method level, this thesis doesfull and deep research on 3D interaction techniques including classification, task analysis, design principles for techniques. After giving main techniques' advantages and disadvantages, several design guidelines are concluded. Two research method aiming at improving interaction naturalness including utilizing human's characteristics and mining space clues are proposed. In the level of implementation, this thesis designs a two-handed interaction technique and pen-based 3D interaction technique. The former -seamless WIM. can seamlessly merge first-person viewpoint and third-person viewpoint. The latter let the user freely use a digital pen to sketch his 3D scene. A component-based multi-level design tool aiming at rapid development is systemically discussed.The three innovative ideas are as follows:1. Two-handed 3D interaction is systemically discussed including its characteristics on two hands' behavior , cognitive psychology , time sequence and events type. A two-handed interaction technique named seamless WIM is put forward, which can seamless merge advantages of first-person and third-person viewpoint. A prototype is developed and an evaluation is carried out aiming at finding the differences between one-handed and two-handed interaction.2. This thesis also proposes a new 3D interaction strategy with a digital pen which usually is thought as a two-dimensional device. Pen3D, a system with the object of freely sketch 3D scene is systemically discussed and developed. Some space clues including constrain > perception and hybrid interaction are used to design a natural and efficient interaction technique.3. A component-based multi-layer design tool for 3D user interfaces is put forward in this thesis. A new balance strategy for real-time rendering and user interaction called DrawTree is proposed. It also extends the concept of abstract events so that the application developed with this tool can run independently with running environment. The interaction technique is designed into a component using dataflow. Moreover, the software architectur...