A ‘plug and play’ approach to testing virtual environment interaction techniques

It is generally agreed that the usability of virtual environment interaction techniques is very poor. One reason for this is because toolkits used by virtual environment developers supply a small number of predefined techniques which are expected to be used regardless of context. In addition, there is no software to facilitate the design and testing of interaction techniques akin to that found for the appearance of the environment. We have developed the Marigold toolset to aid in the systematic design, testing and refining of virtual environment interaction techniques. The toolset uses a visual hybrid specification as a starting point. In this paper we demonstrate how Marigold can be used to aid in determining the suitability of interaction techniques by the rapid testing of alternatives in a ‘plug and play’ style.