Testing the Use of Egocentric Interactive Techniques in Immersive Virtual Environments

Navigation, object selection and manipulation in virtual environments are based on interaction methods or techniques driven by conventional or special devices. There are a number of techniques and devices available for the development of applications involving interaction in immersive worlds, and to choose the most suitable one for a given situation is a difficult task. This paper reports the evaluation of selection and manipulation techniques in an immersive environment based on a chess game. The techniques evaluated in the experiment were the virtual hand, associated to a common mouse or data glove, and the ray-casting, used with a data glove. We propose some hypotheses and discuss experimental results.