Voodoo Dolls: Seamless Interaction at Multiple Scales in Virtual Environments

The Voodoo Dolls technique is a two-handed interaction technique for manipulating objects at a distance in immersive virtual environments. This technique addresses some limitations of existing techniques: they do not provide a lightweight method of interacting with objects of widely varying sizes, and many limit the objects that can be selected and the manipulations possible after making a selection. With the Voodoo Dolls technique, the user dynamically creates dolls: transient, hand held copies of objects whose effects on the objects they represent are determined by the hand holding them. For simplicity, we assume a right-handed user in the following discussion. When a user holds a doll in his right hand and moves it relative to a doll in his left hand, the object represented by the doll in his right hand moves to the same position and orientation relative to the object represented by the doll in his left hand. The system scales the dolls so that the doll in the left hand is half a meter along its longest dimension and the other dolls maintain the same relative size; this allows the user to work seamlessly at multiple scales. The Voodoo Dolls technique also allows both visible and occluded objects to be selected, and provides a stationary frame of reference for working relative to moving objects.