Shaping 3-D boxes: A full 9 degree-of-freedom docking experiment

Enabling users to shape 3-D boxes in immersive virtual environments is a non-trivial problem. In this paper, a new family of techniques for creating rectangular boxes of arbitrary position, orientation, and size is presented and evaluated. These new techniques are based solely on position data, making them different from typical, existing box shaping techniques. The basis of the proposed techniques is a new algorithm for constructing a full box from just three of its corners. The evaluation of the new techniques compares their precision and completion times in a 9 degree-of-freedom (DoF) docking experiment against an existing technique, which requires the user to perform the rotation and scaling of the box explicitly. The precision of the users' box construction is evaluated by a novel error metric measuring the difference between two boxes. The results of the experiment strongly indicate that for precision docking of 9 DoF boxes, some of the proposed techniques are significantly better than ones with explicit rotation and scaling. Another interesting result is that the number of DoF simultaneously controlled by the user significantly influences the precision of the docking.