Project

3D Navigation

Human-Computer Interaction and Visualization

Overview

While advances in computing have empowered users to design and interact with objects in virtual three-dimensional space, little effort has been made to improve or facilitate interaction with the viewpoint. Once we begin to consider this problem, we find that it effectively spans a huge problem domain with many special cases. It touches on many of the fundamental difficulties in 3D interaction: being inside an object vs. being outside, how close is the viewpoint to the object, what is the user looking at and/or is interested in, egocentric vs. exocentric thinking, parallel vs. perspective viewing projections, multiscale and level-of-detail issues, what kind of data is being examined (abstract, incomplete, photoreal, engineering, CAD, entertainment, medical, simulation, etc.), and what is the user task (authoring, inspecting, etc.). Additional technical issues include correct handling of the clipping planes and floating-point precision problems. To help understand and address some of these issues, we have an ongoing research program to improve the state-of-the-art in 3D navigation.

Related Resources

See what’s new.

Publication

2010

Exploring the Design Space of Multiscale 3D Orientation

Recently, research in 3D computer graphics and interaction has started…

Publication

2009

Multiscale 3D Navigation

We present a comprehensive system for multiscale navigation of…

Publication

2009

Multiscale 3D Reference Visualization

Reference grids are commonly used in design software to help users…

Publication

2008

Safe 3D Navigation

Typical commercial 3D CAD tools provide modal tools such as pan, zoom,…

Publication

2008

ViewCube: A 3D Orientation Indicator and Controller

Literally hundreds of thousands of users of 2D computer-aided design…

Publication

2006

ShowMotion: Camera Motion based 3D Design Review

We describe a new interactive system for 3D design review, built to…

Publication

2003

Boom Chameleon

We introduce the Boom Chameleon, a novel input/output device…

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