MagicPad : a spatial human-system interface for immersive virtual environment

Abstract

The thesis presents the research of inventing a novel and natural spatial human-system interface – MagicPad that is to be used in a fully immersive virtual environment. With the advance in Virtual Reality (VR) technology, modern computer systems are capable of immersing users into a synthetic environment. Instead of sitting in front of the monitor, virtual objects are surrounding the users in an immersive VR system and therefore the traditional human-computer interfaces such as mouse and keyboard are no longer appropriate / fit for such purpose. Since then, researchers have been actively seeking new means of human-computer interaction in the three-dimensional space. The objective of this research is to innovate, design and build a novel spatial user interface for immersive VR systems by investigating and identifying the core elements of an intuitive and effective spatial user interface. The research methodology adopted is based on the quantitative research methods where the perception and interaction of human subjects with a synthetic virtual environment such user interfaces are collected to investigate the performance and effectiveness of the spatial user interface. The key elements of an intuitive and effective spatial user interface are first identified and the design concept of the MagicPad user interface prototype is then established. In order to realize the overall design and study the concept of the spatial human-system interface, an immersive Virtual Reality system imseCAVE, which serves as the test bed of the MagicPad user interface is designed and built from scratch. In this research, the MagicPad interface is implemented and quantitative user evaluations with the imseCAVE are carried out to draw conclusion and future research directions in the field of Virtual Reality and 3D User Interfaces.