3DTouch and HOMER-S: intuitive manipulation techniques for one-handed handheld augmented reality

Abstract

Existing interaction techniques for mobile AR often use the multi-touch capabilities of the device's display for object selection and manipulation. To provide full 3D manipulation by touch in an integral way, existing approaches use complex multi finger and hand gestures. However, they are difficult or impossible to use in one-handed handheld AR scenarios and their usage requires prior knowledge. Furthermore, a handheld's touch screen offers only two dimensions for interaction and limits manipulation to physical screen size. To overcome these problems, we present two novel intuitive six degree-of-freedom (6DOF) manipulation techniques, 3DTouch and HOMER-S. While 3DTouch uses only simple touch gestures and decomposes the degrees of freedom, Homer-S provides full 6DOF and is decoupled from screen input to overcome physical limitations. In a comprehensive user study, we explore performance, usability and accuracy of both techniques. Therefore, we compare 3DTouch with HOMER-S in four different scenarios with varying transformation requirements. Our results reveal both techniques to be intuitive to translate and rotate objects. HOMER-S lacks accuracy compared to 3DTouch but achieves significant performance increases in terms of speed for transformations addressing all 6DOF.