The design and evaluation of selection techniques for 3D volumetric displays

Volumetric displays, which display imagery in true 3D space, are a promising platform for the display and manipulation of 3D data. To fully leverage their capabilities, appropriate user interfaces and interaction techniques must be designed. In this paper, we explore 3D selection techniques for volumetric displays. In a first experiment, we find a ray cursor to be superior to a 3D point cursor in a single target environment. To address the difficulties associated with dense target environments we design four new ray cursor techniques which provide disambiguation mechanisms for multiple intersected targets. Our techniques showed varied success in a second, dense target experiment. One of the new techniques, the depth ray, performed particularly well, significantly reducing movement time, error rate, and input device footprint in comparison to the 3D point cursor.