Adapting a cheap game controller as a natural 3D input

Abstract

Due to the huge size of the market for interactive games, game controllers are very cheap. Because of this they are a popular choice as input devices for research in user interfaces. The Software Development Kit that comes with each controller also makes it appealing compared with the effort of creating an original input device. We present a natural user interface for 3D interaction that uses a game controller. Our design is based on five core characteristics: i) It uses cheap hardware as an interface; ii) It implements a 6DoF interaction; iii) It allows 3D manipulation of an object; iv) We test the interface by experiment; and v) We compare the natural interface with a standard mouse interface doing a similar task. Results from the experiment showed that our natural interface is easy to use and has a faster completion times compared with the standard modeling interface.