Showing papers by "Raimund Dachselt published in 1999"

The challenge to build flexible user interface components for non-immersive 3D environments

Abstract: Although 3D widgets, prototyping toolkits and interaction techniques were developed for Virtual Reality (VR) applications, more research is needed to overcome the conceptual and technological difficulties of 3D interface development. Immersive applications have not made their way to the mass market yet. However, one can notice enormous improvements in the graphics performance of PCs, pushing the development of non-immersive 3D graphics applications for the mass market, which use conventional input devices and displays. There is a huge potential for such applications especially in the field of marketing, sales and services. The use of 3D product data (from product development) for product presentations and retail stores suggests itself. Such systems for everyday users should not only be easy to use, but also have attractive interfaces to actually generate sales. These challenges are not easy to face with existing 3D interface technology, basically developed for immersive VR research systems. As a non-immersive example the next section shortly introduces a product presentation system. Based on experiences with the interdisciplinary development of this prototype the main section outlines problems with existing 3D widgets and toolkits and suggests principles for improved 3D interface design.