My dissertation research focused on the design, evaluation, and application of VE interaction techniques. Below you will find a brief abstract and links to a PDF version of my thesis. You can download the entire thesis at once (142 pages), or each chapter as a separate file. Please send me email if you find problems with any of these files.
A large percentage of interactions that take place in immersive VEs fall into a small number of general categories, which include travel (movement of the user's viewpoint from place to place), selection (indicating virtual objects within the environment), and manipulation (setting the position and/or orientation of virtual objects). Given techniques with good performance characteristics for these three interactions, a large number of complex and effective VE applications could be built. In this research we studied ITs for these three universal tasks in the context of a formal, systematic framework, including the design of novel ITs and empirical, comparative evaluations of techniques.
This thesis presents several important results of the use of this methodology. First, we have developed new ITs that perform well in a variety of application scenarios. Second, we have designed general testbeds for IT evaluation that may be reused for future performance comparisons. Third, we have obtained a large set of empirical results regarding the performance of ITs. These results led to general principles and guidelines (section 7.1) that can be applied to VE systems to improve performance. Finally, we validated these results by applying them to a real-world VE application, and showing that its usability was measurably improved as a direct result. The results presented in this thesis should be useful and important to anyone developing a VE system with even a moderate amount of interaction complexity.
Front matter (title page, acknowledgments, table of contents, summary)
Chapter 1 - Introduction
This chapter motivates the need for the research, defines key terms,
and summarizes the methodology and results.
Chapter 2 - Related Work
This chapter reviews key concepts from diverse fields that are related
to this research.
Chapter 3 - Methodology
This chapter introduces the methodology used for the design and evaluation
of VE interaction techniques. It is high-level and technical, and may be
of interest to researchers.
Chapter 4 - Travel
This chapter discusses the interaction task of travel (movement from
place to place in a VE. Five experiments and their results are presented.
Chapter 5 - Selection and Manipulation
This chapter discusses the important tasks of object selection and
manipulation in a VE. The design and results of two experiments are presented.
Chapter 6 - Application of Results
This chapter takes the experimental results and uses them to redesign
the interaction techniques for a specific VE application. It is shown that
this process can increase the subjective usability of the system.
Chapter 7 - Conclusions and Future Work
This chapter summarizes the main contributions of this research. In
particular, it discusses in detail a large number of interaction design
guidelines that come out of this work, which should be useful to VE developers.
Possibilities for future work are also presented.
Other materials (Appendices, References, Vita)
Doug A. Bowman - Assistant Professor Virginia Polytechnic & State University Department of Computer Science 625 McBryde Hall Blacksburg VA 24061 By E-MAIL : bowman@vt.edu