Home // International Journal On Advances in Software, volume 7, numbers 3 and 4, 2014 // View article


Smartphone Based 3D Navigation Techniques in an Astronomical Observatory Context: Implementation and Evaluation in a Software Platform

Authors:
Louis-Pierre Bergé
Gary Perelman
Adrien Hamelin
Mathieu Raynal
Cédric Sanza
Minica Houry-Panchetti
Rémi Cabanac
Emmanuel Dubois

Keywords: museum exhibit, 3D environment, software platform, interactive visualization, interaction with smartphone, 3D navigation, experiment

Abstract:
3D Virtual Environments (3DVE) come up as a good solution to transmit knowledge in a museum exhibit. In such contexts, providing easy to learn and to use interaction techniques which facilitate the handling inside a 3DVE is crucial to maximize the knowledge transfer. We took the opportunity to design and implement a software platform for explaining the behavior of the Telescope Bernard-Lyot to museum visitors on top of the Pic du Midi. Beyond the popularization of a complex scientific equipment, this platform constitutes an open software environment to easily plug different 3D interaction techniques. Recently, popular use of a smartphones as personal handled computer lets us envision the use of a mobile device as an interaction support with these 3DVE. Accordingly, we design and propose how to use the smartphone as a tangible object to navigate inside a 3DVE. In order to prove the interest in the use of smartphones, we compare our solution with available solutions: keyboard-mouse and 3D mouse. User experiments confirmed our hypothesis and particularly emphasizes that visitors find our solution more attractive and stimulating. Finally, we illustrate the benefits of our software framework by plugging alternative interaction techniques for supporting selection and manipulation task in 3D.

Pages: 551 to 566

Copyright: Copyright (c) to authors, 2014. Used with permission.

Publication date: December 30, 2014

Published in: journal

ISSN: 1942-2628