Providing Assistance for Orienting 3D Objects Using Monocular Eyewear

Abstract

Many tasks require that a user rotate an object to match a specific orientation in an external coordinate system. This includes tasks in which one object must be oriented relative to a second prior to assembly and tasks in which objects must be held in specific ways to inspect them. Research has investigated guidance mechanisms for some 6DOF tasks, using wide--field-of-view, stereoscopic virtual and augmented reality head-worn displays (HWDs). However, there has been relatively little work directed toward smaller field-of-view lightweight monoscopic HWDs, such as Google Glass, which may remain more comfortable and less intrusive than stereoscopic HWDs in the near future. We have designed and implemented a novel visualization approach and three additional visualizations representing different paradigms for guiding unconstrained manual 3DOF rotation, targeting these monoscopic HWDs. We describe our exploration of these paradigms and present the results of a user study evaluating the relative performance of the visualizations and showing the advantages of our new approach.