Evaluation of 12-DOF input devices for navigation and manipulation in virtual environments

Abstract

Navigation and manipulation in virtual environments may require up to six degrees of freedom each. Input devices with twelve or more degrees of freedom can avoid explicit changes between navigation and manipulation and may therefore perform well in certain situations. However, usability of already existing 12-DOF devices is still unclear. For evaluating such handheld devices, we developed an extended docking task based on docking tasks designed for examining the usability of 6-DOF devices. In addition to the usually investigated object manipulation, the task requires navigation. We compared docking performances of two 12-DOF devices, the CubicMouse and the YoYo. Additionally, performance with a newly developed 12-DOF input device, the SquareBone, was under study. The SquareBone, a variation of the YoYo idea combined with some potentially beneficial features of the CubicMouse, provides 2 * 6 elastic DOF which can be controlled simultaneously. The study revealed that the isotonic CubicMouse, although preferred by novice users, was outperformed by the elastic SquareBone and the YoYo. The new SquareBone was shown to bear the potential of becoming superior to the YoYo, possibly because it enables simultaneous control of the 2*6 DOF. © IFIP International Federation for Information Processing 2005.