Through-the-Lens Remote Selection

Also known as TTL remote object manipulation

A window on a hand-held pad shows a second view of a remote part of the world; the user reaches the stylus through the window to select and manipulate the objects seen there.

How it works

Uses the Personal Interaction Panel (tracked pad and pen) in an HMD. The pad shows a secondary viewpoint of the scene, set with through-the-lens navigation tools (scene-in-hand, a miniature, eyeball-in-hand). Once the secondary view is fixed in space, the pen pushed into its frustum through the window acts as if it were at the remote place, so remote objects can be selected, dragged and dropped between the local and remote volumes. The paper gives a taxonomy of such techniques and reports only informal use.

Papers

Stanislav L. Stoev, Dieter Schmalstieg (2002). Application and Taxonomy of Through-The-Lens Techniques. Proceedings of the ACM Symposium on Virtual Reality Software and Technology (VRST '02), 57-64 doi:10.1145/585740.585751