Abstract

The most fundamental and common 3D interaction is the control of the virtual camera or viewpoint, commonly referred to as navigation. The navigational requirements of controlling multiple degrees of freedom and maintaining adequate spatial awareness are big challenges to many users. Many tasks additionally demand large portions of cognitive effort from the user for non-navigational aspects. Therefore, new solutions that are simple and naturally efficient are in high demand. These major challenges to 3D navigation have yet to be satisfactorily addressed, and as a result, there has yet to be a declaration of a suitable unified 3D interaction technique or metaphor.

We present a new domain and task independent 3D navigation metaphor, Navigational Puppetry, which we intend to be a candidate for the navigational portion of a unifying 3D interaction metaphor. The major components of the metaphor - the puppet, puppeteer, stage, and puppet-view - enable a new meta-navigational perspective and provide the user with a graspable navigational avatar, within a multiple-view perspective, that allows them to ‘reach’ within the virtual world and manipulate the viewpoint directly. We position this metaphor as a distinct articulation of the front wave of a puppetry related trend in recent 3D navigation solutions. The metaphor was implemented into a tangible user interface prototype called the Navi-Teer. Two usability studies and a unique spatial audio experiment were completed to observe and demonstrate, respectively, the metaphor’s benefits of tactile intimacy, spatial orientation, easy capture of complex input and support for collaboration.