GyroSuite: General-Purpose Interactions for Handheld Perspective Corrected Displays

Handheld Perspective-Corrected Displays (HPCDs) are physical objects that have a notable volume and that display a virtual 3D scene on their entire surface. Being handheld, they create the illusion of holding the scene in a physical container (the display). This has strong benefits for the intuitiveness of 3D interaction: manipulating objects of the virtual scene amounts to physical manipulations of the display. HPCDs have been limited so far to technical demonstrators and experimental tools to assess their merits. However, they show great potential as interactive systems for actual 3D applications. This requires that novel interactions be created to go beyond object manipulation and to offer general-purpose services such as menu command selection and continuous parameter control.

Working with a two-handed spherical HPCD, we report on the design and informal evaluations of various interaction techniques for distant object selection, scene scaling, menu interaction and continuous parameter control. In particular, our design leverages the efficient two-handed control of the rotations of the display. We demonstrate how some of these techniques can be assemble in a self-contained anatomy learning application. Novice participants used the application in a qualitative user experiment. Most participants used the application effortlessly without any training or explanations.