The Influence of Clutching Mechanism on Object Manipulation Tasks in Virtual Environments

Object manipulation is one of the most fundamental tasks in 3D user interfaces. Compared with interacting with objects within reach, remote object manipulation is often more challenging, which is often an iterative process that need clutching. However, while there are many interaction techniques designed for manipulating remote objects, it is not well studied the effects of clutching mechanism on remote object manipulation tasks. In this paper, we present a controlled experiment to evaluate the effects of two clutching mechanisms (Normal Clutching vs. Easy Clutching) on 3-DOF translation, 3-DOF rotation and 6-DOF docking tasks under various tasks settings. The results show that easy clutching can significantly save more completion time and clutching time compared with Normal Clutching. In addition, the results also reveal that easy clutching can be more effective especially when dealing with hard tasks and long user-target distance. We also find that users prefer easy clutching over Normal Clutching, indicating that well designed clutching mechanism can effectively improve user experience in manipulation tasks.