Search

Space deserves a special attention when designing 3D user interfaces. However, many proposed methods rely on simple sketches and/or maps. Besides, those methods usually leave aside the 2D interfaces that may be found in the 3D environment or that surround it. This chapter presents an attempt to formalize 2D and 3D spaces by the definition of a meta-model. This is one of three meta-models that have been defined in three-dimensional user interface development methodology, which is also described here along with some case studies, focusing the description on space.

This chapter describes six different text input techniques and their evaluation. Two techniques stand out from the others. First, a mobile phone keyboard turn out to be a valuable option, offering high typing speed and low typing errors. Second, handwritten character recognition did not perform as good as expected. All findings from this and previous experiments are collected in a proposed guidance tool which will promote their application in future projects.

Focusing on the way users perform their tasks in Collaborative Virtual Environments (CVEs), there is still little research on understanding the impact of different platforms on the collaboration experience, as well as on which tasks a collaborative approach is worth using. Addressing both issues, this paper describes not only a CVE, being one that reproduces a block building game, but also an experiment aimed to evaluate the performance and the overall collaborative experience, as regards the impact that different input and output technologies employed by users and the tasks performed by them have on it. In addition, this paper also describes implementation details of the CVE that are rarely discussed in the literature, presenting an environment model that is based on the novel idea ofinteraction views.