Finger Walking in Place (FWIP): A Traveling Technique in Virtual Environments
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abstract
In this paper we present a Finger Walking in Place (FWIP) interaction technique that allows a user to travel in a virtual world as her/his bare fingers slide on a multi-touch sensitive surface. Traveling is basically realized by translating and rotating the user's viewpoint in the virtual world. The user can translate and rotate a viewpoint by moving her/his fingers in place. Currently, our FWIP technique can be used to navigate in a plane but it can be extended to navigate in the third axis, so that the user can move to any direction in a 3D virtual world. Since our FWIP technique only uses bare fingers and a multi-touch device, finger motions are not precisely detected, especially compared with the use of data gloves or similar sensing devices. However, our experiments show that FWIP can be used as a novel traveling technique even without accurate motion detection. Our experiment tasks include finding and reaching the target(s) with FWIP, and the participants successfully completed the tasks. The experiments illustrate our efforts to make the FWIP technique robust as a scaled-down walking-in-place locomotion technique, so that it can be used as a reliable traveling technique. Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg 2008.
