The Interaction Framework For Innovation: A Method for Creating Reusable Three Dimensional Interaction Techniques

The field of three dimensional interaction techniques (3DITs) provides a way for users to interact with virtual environments (VEs). Interacting with these environments helps provide the numerous benefits that VEs impart to their users. However, the methods and tools for building 3DITs are not well defined. Because of this, there is little reuse of techniques between different VEs. An example of this is the fact that the only reuse happening in the field of 3DITs is developers reading publications about techniques and implementing the techniques from scratch.

This work investigates the reasons behind the lack of reuse through personal experiences, a literature review, and a community survey. It then provides a solution for creating reusable techniques. This is done through foundational work and a toolkit designed to create reusable 3DITs called the Interaction Framework For Innovation (IFFI). We demonstrate that this toolkit can be used to build reusable techniques by studying the reusability of techniques built with the tool; by conducting both a conceptual and in-depth evaluation on creating reusable techniques. These three methods demonstrate that it is possible and feasible to build techniques that can be reused across both applications and toolkits.