Case Study: A VR User Interface

After doing some research on Virtual Reality (VR) user interfaces (UIs) in general, I decided it was best to do a more in depth research on some specific implementations. I have come across many interesting articles and one that I found particularly interesting was the The Go-Go Interaction Technique: Non-linear Mapping for Direct Manipulation in VR. I liked this article and technique because it was specifically aimed at making object interaction and manipulation easier, which is an area that I have mentioned before as being of interest to me.

The Go-Go Interaction Technique allows users to manipulate objects that are both close to and far from themselves. Tracking a Polhemus Fastrak sensor worn on the hand allows a virtual representation of the user's hand to be co-located with the user's actual hand. The Go-Go technique, named after Go-Go Gadget, plays with the length of the user's arm. If the user wants to manipulate an object that is out of reach then all they need to do is to reach their arm past a certain point D, defined to be 2/3 of their own arm's length, and the virtual arm grows in a non-linear fashion, dependent on how far past D the user stretches.

I like this technique for a few reasons. First, there is no special teaching/learning that is involved. In order to get to objects that are out of reach we already know to stretch our arms farther. This movement is natural and intuitive. I also like the simplicity of this technique. There is no input device needed, such as a mouse or keyboard or even vocal input, there is only the body itself.

I believe that the Go-go technique can also be taken and extended fairly easily too, due to its simplicity. For example, this could be used as a way to navigate through an environment. If the virtual environment is larger than the physical one then walking around the room to get to a location becomes impractical. Using a subject's arm direction to indicate where they would like to move is simple and takes away the need for devices such as joysticks. I also think that taking this approach as a jumping off point and extending it to create an entire UI which allows 6 degrees of freedom manipulation of objects is a very interesting path to go down.

Reference

Ivan Poupyrev , Mark Billinghurst , Suzanne Weghorst , Tadao Ichikawa, The go-go interaction technique: non-linear mapping for direct manipulation in VR, Proceedings of the 9th annual ACM symposium on User interface software and technology, p.79-80, November 06-08, 1996, Seattle, Washington, United States