Abstract Various interaction techniques have been developed for interactive 3D environments. This paper presents an up‐to‐date and comprehensive review of the state of the art of non‐immersive interaction techniques for Navigation , Selection & Manipulation , and System Control , including a basic introduction to the topic, the challenges and an examination of a number of popular approaches. We also introduce 3D Interaction Testbed (3DIT) to firstly allow a ‘ hands‐on ' understanding of 3D interaction principles, and secondly to create an open platform for defining evaluation methods, stimuli as well as representative tasks akin to those found in other disciplines of science. We hope that this survey can aid both researchers and developers of interactive 3D applications in having a clearer overview of the topic and in particular can be useful for practitioners and researchers that are new to the field of interactive 3D graphics.

The Web evolved from a text-based system to the current rich and interactive medium that supports images, 2D graphics, audio and video. The major media type that is still missing is 3D graphics. Although various approaches have been proposed (most notably VRML/X3D), they have not been widely adopted. One reason for the limited acceptance is the lack of 3D interaction techniques that are optimal for the hypertext-based Web interface. We present a novel strategy for accessing integrated information spaces, where hypertext and 3D graphics data are simultaneously available and linked. We introduce a user interface that has two modes between which a user can switch anytime: the driven by simple hypertext-based interactions "don't-make-me-think" mode, where a 3D scene is embedded in hypertext and the more immersive 3D "take-me-to-the-Wonderland" mode, which immerses the hypertextual annotations into the 3D scene. A user study is presented, which characterizes the user interface in terms of its efficiency and usability.

There have been many studies of computer based text reading. However, only a few have considered text integrated with video and 3D graphics. This paper presents an investigation into the effects of varying (a) text drawing style (plain, billboard, Anti-Interference, shadow), (b) image polarity (positive and negative), and (c) background style (video and 3D) on text readability. Reading speed and accuracy were measured and subjective views of participants recorded.

The World Wide Web allows users to create and publish a variety of resources, including multimedia ones. Most of the contemporary best practices for designing web interfaces, however, do not take into account the 3D techniques.