Understanding 3D User Interfaces
Discuss About The Coares Advances In Usability Evaluation.
With the advent of virtual reality based environments combined together with technologies such as augmented reality, three dimensional applications and large-screen format display screens, a new trend has emerged in the Human Computer Interaction. Although, there are decades’ worth of experience in applying design principles for traditional UIs, they are still not sufficient in 3D spatial context that involves multiple degrees of freedom. The application developers, designers and researchers quickly realized that the 3D domain had some fundamental differences between them and that newer methods would be needed to develop applications for the 3D User Interface. This particular area is known as 3D User Interfaces, 3DUI or 3D interaction.
A typical 3D based interface involves special spatial based input devices such as 3D pointing devices, gestural input, head-mounted displays or HMDs, stereoscopic projects, haptic feedback devices and even spatial audio systems. However, with these new technologies, people find it difficult to understand and perform action in 3D spaces[2]. Although, we live in a 3D world, it’s an inherently very different than a 3D world as for performing actions in the real world there are lot of hints, cue and feedbacks available for which the same cannot be represented in a computer simulation. As a result, simply adapting a traditional WIMP or Windows Icon Menu Pointers based interface into a 3D will not be an effective solution. Instead, a new design process has to be established that allows successful transformation of the traditional interface into a 3D based interface.
3D interaction is defined as “Human Computer Interaction wherein the tasks performed by the user is directly in a D spatial context” . However, an interactive system that would display a 3D graphic does not necessarily means a 3D interaction. For instance, a user viewing a 3D model of a building on their computer does not mean a 3d interaction has taken place. Now, these definition may not necessarily classify all of the 3D interaction that takes place, however, we could possibly classify them based on the context wherein the 3D interaction took place [20].
- Augmented Reality: A physical object or a virtual object can be overlaid on a real environment allowing the objects to be moved, modified and placed in the physical world.
- Virtual Reality: Head Mounted Displays are the best examples of virtual reality which depicts a user could move through in a virtual environment by pointing 3D directions in the real world [19].
- Large-screen format displays: A motion based controller that allows to control objects and information on large screens giving users the ability to pan, zoom, shuffle and move around the screen and its contents.
- Pervasive and ubiquitous computing: These type of interfaces includes interacting between devices using gestures and actions performed in a 3D spatial context.
The 3D User Interface is an interesting area of user experience development since it’s multi-disciplinary and is impacted by many other interesting research areas such as cognitive psychology, perception, information visualization, educational training and entertainment [7]. Also, unlike the physical environment which is limited in organizing and moving information, digital environments have additional capabilities that allow them to have digitized annotations, easier viewing and moving of data along with simple and advanced text search, different levels of access for users as well as exporting [18] and importing of multiple digital forms. Another advantage over physical environment is that theoretically the amount of information that can be stored is limitless. Shared VR based systems also support a greater degree of collaboration among populations who are physically spread out or geographically dispersed. An example of such system would be VR VIBE that allows collaborators to view the web in a same shared space while also making it possible to view what others are watching [3]. Although, the user browsing in such a 3D based virtual environment may face fatigue and disorientation.
The Multi-Disciplinary Nature of 3DUI
When developers are creating a virtual environment, it is crucial that they pay attention to the experience of users using the system. This phenomenon is known as User Experience or UX and has several different interpretations. For instance, [4] suggest that a user experience typically includes hedonic and usability aspect of the system thereby making it more effective and experiential. According to them, user experience is the resulting interaction between the user and the product wherein the experience in using the product includes physical, sensual, emotional and cognitive aspects. Also, user experience is traditional human computer interaction with a design that is aesthetically pleasing.
If all of the major 3D interaction techniques has been discovered, then one might expect it to find a corresponding boom in real-world usable applications that involves 3D interaction. Unfortunately, in reality, this is not the case. Most of the demonstrations that involve 3D application prototypes are that it still involves a high-degree of usability problems. This lack of boom can be interpreted in different ways. First of all, it means that many fundamental 3D interaction techniques are yet to be invented Secondly, the developers and researchers may have ignored the research results surrounding 3D User Interfaces. Or in other words it means that the knowledge could be available to produce real-world functional 3D UIs, but they aren’t been used for its full potential. Third reason is that it could be possible that developer of a 3D User Interface may not see any commercial benefit beyond entertainment and games. Although, this third problem does have some truth to itself, it still doesn’t explain the reason why even prototypes have bad usability when it comes to 3D User Interfaces. The fourth possible interpretation could be that, all possible 3D UI interactions has been discovered, but this knowledge alone is not sufficient to ensure that the 3D UIs have high usability standards. Keeping this in mind, it means that there needs to be a body of knowledge or a framework developed specifically that turns out to be a design principles when it comes to the designing of Three Dimensional User Interfaces.
This section will help address the issue of the usability aspect of 3D UIs so as to formulate a framework that would help in designing of future 3D User Interfaces. The main issue this framework intends to solve is to provide a high levels of usability and interactivity of 3D UIs. The proposed framework is as follows:
Challenges in Designing 3D User Interfaces
Typically in user interface, generality is considered to be a desirable trait. This means that if the design or interaction is more general, it can be applied to many different applications and situations. However, in terms of 3D UI does not apply very well because it 3D applications vary significantly and the same design pattern or technique cannot be applied over and over. This is enumerated as follows:
- Application and Domain generality: The interaction technique wasn’t designed with any application or domain in mind and is meant to work with all kinds of applications [8].
- Task Generality: The interaction technique was meant to work with all kinds of tasks and it isn’t designed for a specific type of task [9].
- Device Generality: Many designs are made for 3D user interaction without having considered the characteristics of the devices they would be used on. For instance a 3D User Interface design may have been designed to better work on a 6-Degree of Freedom devices but they are being used on HMDs with a wand-like input device.
- User Generality: The type of design did not effectively consider the target group of users and rather considered a ‘typical’ user group.
In order to resolve this designers, developers and researchers should introduce specificity in their designs. The following types of specificity should be included:
- Application specificity: An obvious way to increase the usability of the application is to start the design process from scratch using usability engineering process, specifically for this application [6]. However, the downside with this type of design process is that there is no guarantee that any interaction techniques produced by this type of method could be potentially reused in any other application.
- Domain specificity: In order to accomplish this the designers and developers should gain knowledge of the application domain and develop usability principles for that particular application domain. The advantage to this type of design is that the design is usable in other applications [13].
- Task specificity: The interaction techniques can also be made more usable if they are being designed for specific task requirements rather a general task category. For instance, in a virtual 3D travel exploration application, the interaction techniques should be unique and specific to each of tasks such as exploration, navigation, searching and so on [17].
- Device specificity: The devices being used for input and output for a 3D application may all require unique interaction methods for them. For instance, an application design for a single-button 6-DOF may exhibit critical usability issues when the same application is accessed by a multi-button 6-DOF device. Simultaneously, a 3D UI designed for a large-screen display format may again exhibit serious design problems when instead an HMD is being used.
- User Specificity: The 3D UIs should be user specific. Several factors such as age, demographics, experience level and gender should be used while designing for the users [9].
Designers, developers and researchers try to make their 3D interaction extremely simple by designing the application to perform one thing extremely well. While, this method of design works well in traditional HCI designs, it does not do so in 3D UI context. Instead, the designers should try and include as many complex and real-world interactions as possible so that there is much more fluidity at the end of the users resulting in more intuitive and natural interaction.
As technologies progress, so should the user interactions for them. For instance, in lot of working environments, multi-monitor setup is becoming increasingly common and user interactions designed for a single monitor setup should be adapted to the multi-monitor setup. Researchers and developers should also come up with novel methods of interaction that simulate more of the interactions in the real-world and even beyond. Interactions such as walking, gazing, gestures etc. should be incorporated for a more natural and realistic interaction [11].
Based on the design principles outlined earlier the below mentioned 3D Mock-up has been prepared. The application represented below is a representation of a futuristic 3D based virtual conference. The participants may be located in the same facility or they might be geographically dispersed, however, they could still join together in a single virtual conference room facility. This would be made possible with the help of either AR or VR with a Head Mounted Display. The participants would appear in the same room as they are physically present. This virtual conference provides additional advantages over the traditional method by allowing participants to project applications, documents, presentation files, reports, charts and other data on to the large projector screen behind them. Users can navigate in this virtual conference room is done with the help of a Wand like device that supports 6-axis motion sensing capabilities so that the system can track their movements in full 3D spatial context. The selection and clicking is done with the help of a single button present on the wand device. The below diagram portrays the usage of the wand based device on the six-axis : +X, -X, -Y, +Y, +Z and –Z.
A Framework for Improving Usability
The below diagram uses a unique method of navigation based on the principles outlined earlier and conforms to each of the principles namely task specificity, application specificity, complex interactions among others.
Compared to a more traditional 2d based interfaces, some of the benefits and risks for a 3D based conferencing facility are as follows:
- 3D based simulated conference will help enhance the participants’ comprehension capabilities including enhanced information observation, perception, enhanced awareness and even possible increase in memory and learning [15].
- 3D UI goes a step beyond in simple information visualization. This is because 3D UI has a virtually infinite real-estate when it comes to information visualization and is able to show complex information easily when compared to a traditional approach. It goes even a step beyond by also showing the relationships between different information.
- Information such as charts, graphics, diagrams etc. appear more natural and easy to comprehend in the virtualized conference room. This is because graphics and representations help a user in grasping the information easily.
- Since a 3D based UI may feel more intuitive and responsive, it would also mean that when a user fully learns the interface and becomes an advanced user, then he or she may just be able to perform several actions at a faster pace compared to traditional conference systems [16].
- 3D based user interaction shows a great deal of potential in interacting with the information. The information being presented with these new methods appear more natural and rich compared to the traditional HCI based UIs. The information presented with 3D UIs are also more interactive and could possibly support direct manipulation.
- However, with these great advantages and novel methods of interacting with the information, comes great shortcomings too. The biggest problem with 3D based interaction is the complex map scenario that gets rendered in front of the user viewing the conferencing facility which can cause disorientation, exhaustion and feeling of getting lost within the system [12].
- Another major issue with 3D interaction is that users would need to re-learn the entire mechanism of how they typically used to interact with the previous VOIP based conference as they have been trained and practiced for over decades on traditional HCI systems.
- There is also the problem of limited hardware capabilities that restricts the full potential of 3D systems as running a full-fledged 3D interaction system with multiple interaction points and 3D simulation requires intense hardware resources. This means that every system that a user would use to access the conference would. However, this problem is only temporary as hardware prowess is ever-increasing.
- Finally, 3D based conference does not help resolve problems for people with disabilities, and if any, it only enhances the problem and at present there are no on-going research as to how people with disabilities will be making use of 3D conferencing system [14].
Conclusion
In summary, the report above tries to present that there are various unresolved issues towards the pathway of a world dominated by 3D User Interface. It has already begun happening in the form of Microsoft HoloLens, Nintendo Wii, Apple AR and countless other AR and VR based applications and it will only grow further from here. However, it is important to understand that traditional design principles for user interface design does not apply here and designing for 3D based system require a newer understanding of the system and many a times would require building it from the scratch. This will enhance the chances for right skill transfer thereby increasing the usability of various interaction techniques to be used in 3D. This would in turn lead to a better development of 3D applications and a broader adoption of 3D UIs.
However, there would still be many questions unanswered such as: Will a standard 3D interface would ever be practical? How much interaction would differ between different devices? How does one determine what 3D interaction works best for any given application? How much benefit does a 3D User Interface has over a more traditional system? Perhaps, some of these questions may be answered when 3D UI becomes more mainstream.
References
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