Context-driven interaction in immersive virtual environments

There are many interaction tasks a user may wish to accomplish in an immersive virtual environment. A careful examination of these tasks reveals that they are often performed under different contexts. For each task and context, specialized interaction techniques can be developed. We present the context-driven interaction model: a design pattern that represents contextual information as a first-class, quantifiable component within a user interface and supports the development of context-sensitive applications by decoupling context recognition, context representation, and interaction technique development. As a primary contribution, this model provides an enumeration of important representations of contextual information gathered from across the literature and describes how these representations can effect the selection of an appropriate interaction technique. We also identify how several popular 3D interaction techniques adhere to this design pattern and describe how the pattern itself can lead to a more focused development of effective interfaces. We have constructed a formalized programming toolkit and runtime system that serves as a reference implementation of the context-driven model and a discussion is provided explaining how the toolkit can be used to implement a collection of representative 3D interaction interfaces.