Section: New Results

Navigation techniques in 3D digital cities on mobile touch devices

Participants : Jacek Jankowski, Thomas Hulin, Martin Hachet.

This study aimed at characterizing today's most common interaction techniques for street-level navigation in 3D digital cities, for mobile touch devices, in terms of their efficiency and usability. To do so, we conducted a user study, where we compared target selection (Go-To), rate control (Joystick), position control, and stroke-based control navigation metaphors (see Figure 3 ). The results suggest that users performed best with the Go-To interaction technique. The subjective comments showed a preference of novices towards Go-To and expert users towards the Joystick technique. This work has been accepted for publication at the 3DUI 2014 conference [15] .

Figure 3. Four techniques for navigating in a 3D city on a mobile touch device.

As part of this project on Navigation in 3D digital cities, the Potioc group also built a tutorial about interaction techniques for 3D environments. It was presented at Eurographics 2013 [13] and Web3D 2013 [14] . The goal of this work is to provide an up-to-date state-of-the-art of this topic to the community.