Superiority of a Handheld Perspective-Coupled Display in Isomorphic Docking Performances

Six degrees of freedom docking is one of the most fundamental tasks when interacting with 3D virtual worlds. We investigated docking performances with isomorphic interactions that directly relate the 6-dof pose of the input device to that of the object controlled. In particular, we studied a Handheld Perspective-Coupled Display (HPCD); which is a novel form of interactive system where the display itself is handheld and used as the input device. It was compared to an opaque HMD and to a standard indirect flat display used with either a sphere or an articulated arm as the input device. A novel computation of an Index of Difficulty was introduced to measure the efficiency of each interaction. We observed superior performances with the HPCD compared with the other interactions by a large margin (17% better than the closest interaction).