Performance Characteristics of a Camera-Based Tangible Input Device for Manipulation of 3D Information

This paper describes a prototype tangible six degree of freedom (6 DoF) input device that is inexpensive and intuitive to use: a cube with colored corners of specific shapes, tracked by a single camera, with pose estimated in real time. A tracking and automatic color adjustment system are designed so that the device can work robustly with noisy surroundings and is invariant to changes in lighting and background noise. A system evaluation shows good performance for both refresh (above 60 FPS on average) and accuracy of pose estimation (average angular error of about 1). A user study of 3D rotation tasks shows that the device outperforms other 6 DoF input devices used in a similar desktop environment. The device has the potential to facilitate interactive applications such as games as well as viewing 3D information.