3D Magic Wand
Also known as Magic wand
The user touches one seed object with a small 3D cursor, and the selection grows automatically to every object linked to it by short hops, like a paint program's magic wand; the scroll wheel sets the hop distance.
How it works
Single-linkage region growing in 3D: an object joins the selection if it lies within the threshold distance of any object already selected, so clusters of any shape are captured without crossing gaps larger than the threshold. Adding seeds extends the selection. With 18 participants in an nVisor HMD selecting about 1,700 targets among 3,300 distractors in five cloud layouts, the magic wand was fastest but failed when clouds touched, the brush was rated easiest, and the box lasso needed the fewest operations; no tool suited every layout.
Papers
- Rasmus Stenholt (2012). Efficient Selection of Multiple Objects on a Large Scale. Proceedings of the 18th ACM Symposium on Virtual Reality Software and Technology (VRST '12), 105-112 doi:10.1145/2407336.2407357