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From: cphoenix@csli.Stanford.EDU (Chris Phoenix)
Newsgroups: sci.virtual-worlds
Subject: Many-dimensional input devices
Message-ID: <7985@milton.u.washington.edu>
Date: 20 Sep 90 23:10:51 GMT
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Organization: Center for the Study of Language and Information, Stanford U.
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So far, I've heard people talking about input devices mainly in terms of 
moving the user's viewpoint around the "space".  But there are many other
things that can be done as well.  For example, a VR artist may draw a 
picture and want to be able to change several things quickly until it is 
"just right".  An architect may have hundreds or thousands of variables to
specify a building.  A statistician needs to specify how to map a data set
onto an N-dimensional graph.

All of these tasks involve many variables which can change independently.
As long as we're dealing with many dimensions anyway, it seems like VR 
could be quite useful to allow people to develop a good fit to a problem
with many variables.  

But input devices have a limited number of degrees of freedom, so they can
only specify a few dimensions at a time.  What kind of transformation could 
you apply to, say, a dataglove to allow specification of coordinates in 
arbitrarily large dimensions?  Perhaps you could use one DF to specify which
dimensions the others controlled.  As you bend your finger, different parts 
of the building you're designing become highlighted, and then moving your
hand changes their parameters.  However, this seems clumsy and it still won't
let you change many dimensions at a time.  Perhaps some functions could be
specified to derive some coordinate values from others--you could specify that
windows should always end 2 feet below the ceiling, and then when you changed
the ceiling height the windows would change too.  But these functions would
be impossible to guess in advance, and awkward to specify at runtime.  Perhaps
you could use "intelligent" software to allow you to change dimensions by 
reaching for their manifestations in the picture, so that you could just grab
a windowframe and move it.  But this only works for attributes that you can 
touch in some sense, and it would be hard to make it intuitive for very many
things.  (Picture a point in a graph.  When you grab it, does that mean you 
want to change the shape or the color?)

Does anyone else have any suggestions for ways to build such input devices,
either hardware or software?


-- 
War is a little naked kid running along a road and screaming because the 
napalm hurts so bad. War is young men in body bags -- theirs and ours. And 
the dying doesn't necessarily have anything to do with baseball, apple pie 
and the Grand Old Flag.  -- Mike Royko