A comparative study of three bimanual travel techniques for desktop virtual walkthroughs

This paper presents the results of a formal experiment that compared three bimanual travel techniques for desktop virtual walkthroughs, each having a different number of degrees of freedom (DOF) for the control interface. When compared in a primed search task, results indicate that the use of a 4-DOF interface with integrated pitch control provides a more realistic travel experience by allowing full visual exploration around the scene, while slightly increasing completion time when compared to the use of a 2-DOF or 3-DOF interface. The evaluation method developed here could be used to conduct further experimentation to explore other desktop travel techniques and/or other types of virtual environments.