From mconway@microsoft.com Fri May 1 15:50:30 1998 Received: from burdell.cc.gatech.edu (root@burdell.cc.gatech.edu [130.207.3.207]) by lennon.cc.gatech.edu (8.8.4/8.6.9) with ESMTP id PAA14243 for ; Fri, 1 May 1998 15:50:26 -0400 (EDT) Received: from wheaten.hitl.washington.edu (V+l6a3mi1mq7Som2tMxE7EnXQDq6jh28@[128.95.73.60]) by burdell.cc.gatech.edu (8.8.4/8.6.9) with ESMTP id PAA06738 for ; Fri, 1 May 1998 15:50:25 -0400 (EDT) Received: from mail1-b.microsoft.com (mail1-b.microsoft.com [131.107.3.125]) by wheaten.hitl.washington.edu (8.8.8/8.6.12) with ESMTP id MAA04500 for <3d-ui@hitl.washington.edu>; Fri, 1 May 1998 12:50:20 -0700 (PDT) Received: by INET-IMC-01 with Internet Mail Service (5.5.2166.0) id ; Fri, 1 May 1998 12:49:49 -0700 Message-ID: <4FD6422BE942D111908D00805F3158DF05B2665A@red-msg-52.dns.microsoft.com> From: Matt Conway To: 3d-ui@hitl.washington.edu Subject: RE: Interaction technique idea Date: Fri, 1 May 1998 12:49:44 -0700 MIME-Version: 1.0 X-Mailer: Internet Mail Service (5.5.2166.0) Content-Type: text/plain; charset="iso-8859-1" Status: RO Hey Jeff! I like this idea - though I suspect that in some cases, you might actually get three modes in some limited cases by considering the case of an object that gets grabbed with both hands at the same time. (Cracking an egg?) Also: consider the following -- What mode are you in if you have a tool in your left hand, a tool in your right and an "operand" object held in a vice in front of you? Seems that the object that is the center of attention could set the mode by knowing what sort of thing was "holding it" and how. (Think about multi-person VR...) Perhaps this idea generalizes to the idea of objects and the tools that hold them (ick, that sounds like a Jerry Springer episode). Putting that kind of mode-switching "smarts" into the objects might make it hard to think about and to build large, interactive virtual worlds where the objects are allowed to come from different authors. The voodoo dolls work you did was nice because it was an object independent and therefore controllable protocol for doing object-based mode switching. Matt -----Original Message----- From: Jeff Pierce [mailto:jpierce@cs.cmu.edu] Sent: Friday, May 01, 1998 12:29 PM To: 3d-ui@hitl.washington.edu Subject: Interaction technique idea Well, in the interest of jump-starting some discussion I thought I'd toss out an idea I've been playing with and see what people think. I'm playing with the idea of implicit mode changes. Mark created one of these for his dissertation: if you point at an object and your hand isn't visible, you laser point to select. If your hand is visible, you use an image plane technique. The idea I'm playing with is using the dominant hand (DH) - non-dominant hand (NDH) asymmetry to specify implicit mode changes. Please, consider the following (science rules!): The way you use a fork generally depends on the hand you're holding it in. If you hold it in your DH, odds are you're picking up food with it. If you hold it in your NDH, you're probably bracing food so you can cut it. The way you use the fork is determined by the hand it's in. OR... I hold in my hands a paintbrush and a hammer. If the brush is in my DH and the hammer in my NDH, I probably want to paint on the hammer. But if the brush is in my NDH and the hammer in my DH, odds are I want to break the paint brush. Thank you for joining me on "Consider the Following". So the basic idea here is that you can give objects 2 modes and switch between them easily by changing the hand that holds the object. Theoretically there will be a natural mapping between what hand is holding the object and what you want to do with it. This also scales to a technique I came up with that we nicknamed "Voodoo Dolls": repositioning objects by moving handheld copies of objects. The object represented by the copy in your DH is positioned relative to the object you hold in your NDH. Note that this implicit moding only buys you 2 modes: if you want more than that, you're going to have to figure out ways to get the rest. Thoughts? Jeff