We are very happy to present the ISMAR 2011 Demonstrations Program. Demos embody "hello world" - the slogan of this year's ISMAR conference - and have a special place in the consciousness of the community. They provide us with our first glimpse of new ideas, a venue for directly interacting with implemented versions of novel concepts, and an opportunity to engage with the people of this community in the context of their work.

To make virtual environment experiences more engaging, we propose to use multiple interaction devices and to support collaborative travel for co-located groups of users. Results of a preliminary pilot study of a collaborative travel task for pairs of users in a projection-based display system suggest that the use of multiple controllers is much more effective and satisfying than swapping and sharing a single device. The study also highlights functional differences between coordination policies for collaborative travel.

Users of virtual environments regularly have problems using 3D motion interfaces and exhibit a disturbing tendency to become disoriented and get quickly in large virtual worlds. We introduce the active guideline, a novel auxiliary motion technique and navigation aid for virtual environments. Similar to the ubiquitous Back-button interface for web navigation, the active guideline implicitly records a history of the user's motion and allows immediate and convenient travel back (and forth) along a trace of the previously traveled path. This lets users revisit previous viewpoints, allowing them to recover from being lost in space by enabling easy, continuous backtracking all the way up to the home position. In contrast to bookmarking of viewpoints, the active guideline is always-on and requires no active user intervention or strategic planning to successfully function as a navigation aid. This paper discusses the behavior and implementation of the active guideline and presents results of an initial study exploring the usability of the technique.

In a common application scenario, large screen projection-based stereoscopic display systems are not used by a single user alone, but are shared by a small group of people. Using multiviewpoint images for multiuser interaction does not require special hardware and scales transparently with the number of colocated users in a system. We present a qualitative and quantitative study comparing usability and interaction performance for multiviewpoint images to non-head-tracked and head-tracked interaction for ray-casting selection and in-hand object manipulation. Results show that while direct first-person interaction in projection-based displays without head-tracking is difficult or even completely impractical, interaction with multiviewpoint images can produce similar or even better performance than fully head-tracked interaction. For ray-casting selection, interaction with multiviewpoint images is actually up to 10 percent faster than head-tracked interaction. For in-hand object manipulation in a simple docking task, multiviewpoint interaction performs only about 6 percent slower than fully head-tracked interaction.

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Large screen projection-based display systems are very often not used by a single user alone, but shared by a small group of people. We have developed an interaction paradigm allowing multiple users to share a virtual environment in a conventional single-view stereoscopic projection-based display system, with each of the users handling the same interface and having a full first-person experience of the environment.Multi-viewpoint images allow the use of spatial interaction techniques for multiple users in a conventional projection-based display. We evaluate the effectiveness of multi-viewpoint images for ray selection and direct object manipulation in a qualitative usability study and show that interaction with multi-viewpoint images is comparable to fully head-tracked (single-user) interaction. Based on ray casting and direct object manipulation, using tracked PDA's as common interaction device, we develop a technique for co-located multi-user interaction in conventional projection-based virtual environments. Evaluation of the VRGEO Demonstrator, an application for the review of complex 3D geo-seismic data sets in the oil-and-gas industry, shows that this paradigm allows multiple users to each have a full first-person experience of a complex, interactive virtual environment.

It is an interesting challenge to design input devices that are easy to learn and use and that allow a wide range of differentiated input. We have developed a novel joystick-like handheld input device as a 6DOF elastic rate controller for travel and rate-controlled object manipulation in virtual environments. The NOYO combines a 6DOF elastic force sensor with a 3DOF source-less isotonic orientation tracker. This combination allows consistent mapping of input forces from local device coordinates to absolute world coordinates, effectively making the NOYO a "SpaceMouse to go". The device is designed to allow one-handed as well as two-handed operation, depending on the task and the skill level of the user. A quantitative usability study shows the handheld NOYO to be up to 21% faster, easier to learn, and significantly more efficient than the SpaceMouse desktop device.

No abstract available.

We present the i-Cone/spl trade/ : a new projection-based panoramic display system for virtual environments. The i-Cone/spl trade/ uses conical screen geometry, resulting in optimized projector placement to create an extended workspace for standing participants in afront projection curved screen display with a very large continuous field of view. Improved acoustical properties of the conical screen geometry enable the use of immersive spatial audio. Combined with the excellent visual quality and homogeneity of a curved screen display, these properties make the i-Cone/spl trade/ an attractive display system for immersive virtual environments, suitable for larger audiences. Interaction paradigms and application examples for this new immersive display system are presented.