Towards Preferences in Virtual Environment Interfaces

Virtual Environment interfaces are designed by implementing an interaction metaphor and comparing it to existing implementations. This technique has proven effective in desktop interfaces but the difficulty of working inside a VE remains because VE interfaces do not understand what the user is trying to do, only what the metaphor wants to do. To handle this problem, we investigated a lower-level approach in interface design of letting the user work as they wish and the interface adapting to the user's method of interaction. Two exploratory experiments were performed on the task of selection to learn how users want to work, with the results being that users do not know until guided by affordances and feedback. Discussed is the intelligent capturing and dealing with VE interface data in terms of Nuances that can represent the details of the interface.