A sophisticated manipulation aid in a virtual environment based on the dynamic constraints among object faces

An intuitive method is proposed to help the user manipulates an object in a virtual environment. The method does not give special properties to the object faces in advance and does not use special hardware. Instead, it uses only the visual constraints among the object faces that are dynamically selected while the user manipulates the object. By constraining more than two faces during assistance, the proposed method efficiently helps the user with complicated manipulation tasks. Experimental results show the effectiveness of this method particularly when the user is requested to precisely place a virtual object at a certain location.