A Light-Pointing Method for Virtual Object Selection and Manioulation in A Monoscopic Viewing System

Virtual object selection and re-location are two basic object manipulations that can be found in most VR/VE applications. Many interaction metaphors have been developed for object manipulation in VR/VE environments. Of particular interest is the ray-casting method. The method applies a light ray metaphor in selecting and moving a virtual object. However, the method implicitly requires a stereoscopic viewing system to be efficiently use. With a monoscopic viewing system, inefficiency of the method in terms of task completion time is demonstrated in this paper. For a system using a monoscopic viewing device, a light-pointing method based on a laser-pointer metaphor is proposed to alleviate the shortcoming of the original ray-casting method. Compared with the ray-casting method, it was found from the experiment that the proposed method is noticeably more efficient in terms of task completion time.