Formalizing the design, evaluation, and application of interaction techniques for immersive virtual environments

Immersive virtual environments (VEs) have potential in many application are as, but many complex VE systems exhibit usability and interaction problems. This is partly due to a lack of consideration or understanding of 3D inter action tasks and techniques. This paper proposes the systematic study of th e design, evaluation, and application of VE interaction techniques. In this methodology, design and evaluation are based on a formal task analysis and categorization of techniques, using multiple performance measures. As a di rect consequence of our use of this methodology, we also present a variety of novel designs and evaluation results with respect to interaction techniq ues for three common VE tasks. (C) 1999 Academic Press.