3D Selection Vault

Semantic 3D Pointing

Also known as Semantic picking

The mouse pointer slows down over objects that can be picked and speeds up across empty screen space, so targets in a 3D scene become effectively larger in motor space without changing what the user sees.

How it works

The screen projections of all pickable objects are written to the stencil buffer, and a quadtree over it gives the distance from the pointer to the nearest target for every screen position in real time. That distance sets the ratio between mouse movement and pointer movement, from 1:1.2 far from targets down to 1:0.4 on them; the pointer can also shrink and targets be highlighted as feedback. A left click picks. In an informal study with 8 participants in two game-like scenes (a first-person indoor scene and a strategy battlefield), it cut clicks per target from 1.40 to 1.08 with no difference in time (57.4 s vs 59.7 s per scene). Distractor objects in the semantic space could slow the pointer down.

Papers