Skip to main content
SpringerLink
Log in

vDesign: a CAVE-based virtual design environment using hand interactions

  • Original Paper
  • Published:
Journal on Multimodal User Interfaces Aims and scope Submit manuscript

Abstract

The cave automatic virtual environment (CAVE) system is one of the most fully immersive systems for virtual reality environments. By providing users with realistic perception and immersive experience, CAVE systems have been widely used in many fields, including military, education, health care, entertainment, design, and others. In this paper, we focus on the design applications in the CAVE. The design applications involve many interactions between the user and the CAVE. However, the conventional interaction tool, the wand, cannot provide fast and convenient interactions. In this paper, we propose vDesign, a CAVE-based virtual design environment using hand interactions. The hand interactions in vDesign are classified into menu navigation and object manipulations. For menu navigation, we define two interactions: activating the main menu and selecting a menu item. For object manipulations, we define three interactions: moving, rotating, and scaling an object. By using the proposed hand interactions, we develop the functions of image segmentation and image composition in vDesign. With the image segmentation function, the designer can select and cut the interested objects from different images. With the image composition function, the designer can manipulate the segmented objects and combine them as a composite image. We implemented the vDesign prototype in CAVE and conducted experiments to evaluate the interaction performance in terms of manipulation time and distortion. The experimental results demonstrated that the proposed hand interactions can provide faster and more accurate interactions compared to the traditional wand interactions.

This is a preview of subscription content, log in via an institution to check access.

Access this article

Log in via an institution

Price excludes VAT (USA)
Tax calculation will be finalised during checkout.

Instant access to the full article PDF.

Institutional subscriptions

Fig. 1
Fig. 2
Fig. 3
Fig. 4
Fig. 5
Fig. 6
Fig. 7
Fig. 8
Fig. 9
Fig. 10
Fig. 11
Fig. 12
Fig. 13

Similar content being viewed by others

References

  1. Openscenegraph. http://www.openscenegraph.org/projects/osg

  2. Photomontage. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Photomontage

  3. Vr juggler. http://vrjuggler.org/

  4. Abramyan L, Powell M, Norris J (2012) Stage: controlling space robots from a cave on earth. In: 2012 IEEE aerospace conference. IEEE, pp 1–6

  5. Biocca F, Delaney B (1995) Immersive virtual reality technology. Communication in the age of virtual reality, pp 57–124

  6. Bowman DA, Wingrave CA (2001) Design and evaluation of menu systems for immersive virtual environments. In: IEEE proceedings of virtual reality. IEEE, pp 149–156

  7. Boykov Y, Funka-Lea G (2006) Graph cuts and efficient nd image segmentation. Int J Comput Vis 70:109–131

    Article  Google Scholar 

  8. Boykov YY, Jolly MP (2001) Interactive graph cuts for optimal boundary and region segmentation of objects in nd images. In: Proceedings of IEEE international conference on computer vision, vol 1, pp 105–112

  9. Burdea G, Coiffet P (2003) Virtual reality technology. Presence Teleoperators Virtual Environ 12(6):663–664

    Article  Google Scholar 

  10. Creagh H (2003) Cave automatic virtual environment. In: Proceedings of IEEE electrical insulation conference and electrical manufacturing, pp 499–504 (2003)

  11. Cruz-Neira C, Sandin DJ, DeFanti TA (1993) Surround-screen projection-based virtual reality: the design and implementation of the cave. In: Proceedings of the 20th annual conference on computer graphics and interactive techniques. ACM, pp 135–142

  12. Cruz-Neira C, Sandin DJ, DeFanti TA, Kenyon RV, Hart JC (1992) The cave: audio visual experience automatic virtual environment. Commun ACM 35(6):64–72

    Article  Google Scholar 

  13. Ge F, Wang S, Liu T (2007) New benchmark for image segmentation evaluation. J Electron Imaging 16(3)

  14. Kenyon RV, Sandin D, Smith RC, Pawlicki R, Defanti T (2007) Size-constancy in the cave. Presence Teleoperators Virtual Environ 16(2):172–187

    Article  Google Scholar 

  15. Kim JS, Gračanin D, Matković K, Quek F (2010) The effects of finger-walking in place (fwip) for spatial knowledge acquisition in virtual environments. In: Springer smart graphics, pp 56–67 (2010)

  16. Koike M, Makino M (2009) Crayon a 3D solid modeling system on the cave. In: Proceedings of IEEE international conference on image and graphics, pp 634–639

  17. Li Y, Shark LK, Hobbs SJ, Ingham J (2010) Real-time immersive table tennis game for two players with motion tracking. In: IEEE 2010 14th international conference information visualisation (IV). IEEE, pp 500–505

  18. Lugrin JL, Charles F, Cavazza M, Le Renard M, Freeman J, Lessiter J (2012) Caveudk: a vr game engine middleware. In: Proceedings of the 18th ACM symposium on virtual reality software and technology. ACM, pp 137–144

  19. Ohno N, Kageyama A (2007) Introduction to virtual reality visualization by the cave system. In: Usui H, Omura Y (eds) Advanced methods for space simulations. TERRAPUB, Tokyo, pp 167–207

  20. Pausch R, Proffitt D, Williams G (1997) Quantifying immersion in virtual reality. In: Proceedings of the 24th ACM annual conference on computer graphics and interactive techniques, pp 13–18

  21. Prachyabrued M, Ducrest D, Borst C (2011) Handymap: a selection interface for cluttered vr environments using a tracked hand-held touch device. Advance Visual Computing, pp 45–54

  22. Raut S, Raghuvanshi M, Dharaskar R, Raut A (2009) Image segmentation—a state-of-art survey for prediction. In: Proceedings of IEEE international conference on advanced computer control, pp 420–424 (2009)

  23. Rother C, Kolmogorov V, Blake A (2004) Grabcut: interactive foreground extraction using iterated graph cuts. ACM Trans Graphics (TOG) 23(3):309–314

  24. Ruddle RA, Savage JC, Jones DM (2002) Symmetric and asymmetric action integration during cooperative object manipulation in virtual environments. ACM Trans Comput Hum Interact (TOCHI) 9(4):285–308

    Article  Google Scholar 

  25. Silva R, Giraldi G, Oliveira JC (2003) Introduction to virtual reality. Tech. rep., Technical Report: 06/2003. LNCC, Brazil

  26. Song P, Goh WB, Fu CW, Meng Q, Heng PA (2011) Wysiwyf: exploring and annotating volume data with a tangible handheld device. In: Proceedings of SIGCHI conference on human factors in computing systems, pp 1333–1342

  27. Sutcliffe A, Gault B, Fernando T, Tan K (2006) Investigating interaction in cave virtual environments. ACM Trans Comput Hum Interact (TOCHI) 13(2):235–267

    Article  Google Scholar 

  28. Wijayasekara D, Linda O, Manic M (2011) Cave-som: immersive visual data mining using 3d self-organizing maps. In: The 2011 international joint conference on neural networks (IJCNN). IEEE, pp 2471–2478

  29. Wu A, Reilly D, Tang A, Mazalek A (2011) Tangible navigation and object manipulation in virtual environments. In: Proceedings of the fifth international conference on tangible, embedded, and embodied interaction. ACM, pp 37–44

  30. Wu Q, Boulanger P, Kazakevich M, Taylor R (2010) A real-time performance system for virtual theater. In: Proceedings of the 2010 ACM workshop on surreal media and virtual cloning. ACM, pp 3–8

  31. Yang X, Deines E, Lauer C, Aurich JC (2011) A human-centered virtual factory. In: 2011 International conference on management science and industrial engineering (MSIE). IEEE, pp 1138–1142

Download references

Acknowledgments

This work was supported in part by the Canada Research Chair Program, NSERC Discovery Grant, and NSFC Grant 61210005.

Author information

Authors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering, Ryerson University, 350 Victoria Street, Toronto, ON, M5B 2K3, Canada

    Xiaoming Nan, Ziyang Zhang, Ning Zhang, Fei Guo, Yifeng He & Ling Guan

Authors
  1. Xiaoming Nan
    View author publications

    You can also search for this author in PubMed Google Scholar

  2. Ziyang Zhang
    View author publications

    You can also search for this author in PubMed Google Scholar

  3. Ning Zhang
    View author publications

    You can also search for this author in PubMed Google Scholar

  4. Fei Guo
    View author publications

    You can also search for this author in PubMed Google Scholar

  5. Yifeng He
    View author publications

    You can also search for this author in PubMed Google Scholar

  6. Ling Guan
    View author publications

    You can also search for this author in PubMed Google Scholar

Corresponding author

Correspondence to Xiaoming Nan.

Rights and permissions

Reprints and permissions

About this article

Check for updates. Verify currency and authenticity via CrossMark

Cite this article

Nan, X., Zhang, Z., Zhang, N. et al. vDesign: a CAVE-based virtual design environment using hand interactions. J Multimodal User Interfaces 8, 367–379 (2014). https://doi.org/10.1007/s12193-014-0168-x

Download citation

  • Received:

  • Accepted:

  • Published:

  • Issue Date:

  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s12193-014-0168-x

Keywords

Search

Navigation