The clutch: two-handed mobile multi-touch 3D object translation and manipulation

Nowadays, handheld devices such as smartphones provide users with multi-touch input screens. Displaying interactive and touch-enabled 3D environments in such handheld devices has become popular in different applications like games or virtual reality. Technologies such as Web3D and WebGL have made the creation and display of 3D environments in mobile devices easier than ever. However, object manipulation techniques are not as well developed. For example, moving an object within the 3D environment or other similar object-specific manipulations are neither intuitive nor easy to perform. Current manipulation techniques like Gizmo that are successful in systems that use mouse and keyboard are not designed for and do not work well for multi-touch handheld devices. In this paper, we present a novel technique to perform object manipulation in 6DOF in multi-touch screens. Our performance evaluations show that our technique compared to existing techniques such as Gizmo improves task completion time by 63% while increasing task precision by 52%.