A Study of Distance of Manipulation on the Responsive WorkbenchTM

Virtual environments such as the Responsive WorkbenchTM1 allow the close manipulation of virtual objects. We define close manipulation as either direct manipulation or manipulation at a relatively small distance. This paper reports on two studies on close manipulation using the Responsive Workbench. The first study investigates the influence of manipulation distance on performance in a 3D location task. The results indicate that direct manipulation and 20 cm distance manipulation are more efficient than for 40 and 55 cm distances. The second study investigates the effect of two factors: the presence or absence of a visual clue, and the scale value, which is a variation of the scale (1 or 1.5) used to map the user’s movements to the pointer. Task performance is significantly lower when using the visual clue, and when using the 1.5