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pCubee : evaluation of a tangible outward-facing geometric display

University of British Columbia

This thesis describes the evaluation of pCubee, a handheld outward-facing geometric display that supports high-quality visualization and tangible interaction with 3D content. Through reviewing existing literatures on 3D display technologies, we identified and examined important areas that have yet to be fully understood for outward-facing geometric displays. We investigated the performance of a dynamic visual calibration technique to compensate for tracking errors, and we demonstrated four novel interaction schemes afforded by tangible outward-facing geometric displays, including static content visualization, dynamic interaction with reactive virtual objects, scene navigation through display movements, and bimanual interaction. Two experiments were conducted to evaluate the impact of display seams and pCubee's potential in spatial reasoning tasks respectively. Two stimuli, a path-tracing visualization task and a 3D cube comparison task that was similar to a mental rotation task, were utilized in the experiments. In the first experiment, we discovered a significant effect on user performance in path-tracing that was dependent on the seam thickness. As seam size increased beyond a thickness threshold, subjects relied less on multiple screens and spent longer time to trace paths. In the second experiment, we found that subjects had significant preference for using the pCubee display compared to a desktop display setup when solving our cube comparison problem. Both time and accuracy using pCubee were as good as using a much larger, more familiar desktop display. This proved the utility of outward-facing geometric displays for spatial reasoning tasks. Our analysis and evaluation identified promising potential but current limitations of pCubee. The outcomes from our analysis can help to facilitate development and more systematic evaluations of similar displays in the future.

Text

2011-04-26

Attribution 3.0 Unported

http://hdl.handle.net/2429/33951

Electrical and Computer Engineering

University of British Columbia

UBCV

http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0/