3D Selection Vault

Quad Cone

Also known as QuadCone

A cone from the controller gathers the candidate objects, and the trigger spreads them over a menu split into four quadrants; pointing at the quadrant holding the target narrows the set until one object is left, as in SQUAD.

How it works

The user aims a cone (a spotlight) so that it contains the target and presses the trigger. With a single object inside, it is selected at once. Otherwise all objects in the cone are spread evenly over a quartered menu, and the user points at the quadrant containing the target, repeating until one object remains. It combines spotlight cone selection with SQUAD's quad-menu refinement and was built as a baseline representing two-step techniques. Experiment 1 (12 participants, HTC Vive, ten spheres at near, middle and far depths): BubbleRay-A 20.9 s per scene, BubbleRay-E 23.1 s, Heuristic Ray 26.2 s, 3D Bubble Cursor 27.4 s, Quad Cone 30.9 s, Naive Ray 46.2 s and Go-Go 56.2 s; error rates 1.8%, 2.7%, 4.4%, 1.0%, 0.4%, 23.5% and 15.0%. Experiment 2 (12 participants, dense, occluded and dense-plus-occluded layouts): the bubble rays were fast but error-prone in dense scenes, while Quad Cone was slowest with the fewest errors.

Papers