Benzina, Amal, Dey, Arindam, Tönnis, Marcus, and Klinker, Gudrun (2013) Empirical evaluation of mapping functions for navigation in virtual environments using phones with integrated sensors. International Journal of Innovative Computing, Information and Control, 9 (12). pp. 4693-4709.

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Abstract

Mobile phones provide an interesting all-in-one alternative for 3D input devices in virtual environments. Mobile phones are both touch sensitive and spatially aware, and they are now part of our daily activities. We present Phone-Based Motion Control, a novel one-handed travel technique for a virtual environment. The technique benefits from the touch sensitivity of the mobile phone to change the viewpoint translation in virtual environments, while orientation of the viewpoint in controlled by the built-in sensors in the mobile phone. The travel interaction thus separates translation (touch based translation control) and rotation (steer based rotation control), putting each set of degrees of freedom (DOF) to a separate interaction technique (separability). This paper investigates, how many DOF are needed to perform the travel task as easy and comfortable as possible. It also investigates different mapping functions between the user's actions on the mobile phone and the viewpoint change in the virtual environment. Therefore, four techniques are implemented: rotate by heading, rotate by roll, rotate by roll with fixed horizon, and a merged rotation. Each technique has either 4 or 5 DOF and different mappings between phone and viewpoint coordinates in the virtual environment. We perform a user study to explore different aspects related to the travel techniques in terms of DOF and mapping functions. Results of the user study show that 4 DOF travel techniques are advantageous for travelling in VE. Also the participants subjectively preferred the use of mobile roll as the desired mapping to control the viewpoint heading in VE.

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