Section: New Results

3D navigation on multitouch displays

Participants : Clément Moerman, Damien Marchal [correspondant] , Nicolas Roussel.

Navigation is one of the elementary tasks of 3d virtual environment. It is composed of two parts: locomotion where there is a physical control of the camera and the wayfinding where a path is found through the environment. Despite being widely studied, there is still need for more efficient and intuitive techniques especially for novice users. Within the context the I-Lab, we worked on a new locomotion technique that combines the advantages of multi-scale navigation and of direct manipulation (Figure 8 ). The technique, called Drag'n Go, was evaluated with a comparative experiment against three other techniques. The results show that Drag'n Go: improves performances, reduces learning time and get good user satisfaction either from novice and expert users. The approach and the associated experiment are published in [20] .

Figure 8. With the Drag'n Go method user can navigate in a 3D virtual environment with a multi-touch device. The movement speed is calculated using perspective based progression scale and it is let under the user's control.