Multisensory interaction metaphors with haptics and proprioception in virtual environments

For several years, virtual environments (VEs) are promising applications to explore and manipulate 3D data and 3D worlds. Those environments are designed to be intuitive and easy to use, however, in practice no ideal solution has been proposed yet. Designers and researchers always have to make compromises due to the complexity of the human senses and technical and financial restrictions. It is widely accepted that multisensory metaphors dramatically can improve the user's performance when interaction in a VE. In this paper, we present a modelling application, for research purposes, called nVRment, which uses and combines several interaction metaphors. The aim of this application is to test in practice our newly proposed metaphors: the "Object In Hand" metaphor, which uses proprioception together with force feedback for manipulations and the "Small Scene Manipulation" which is suitable for manipulation of an object in its local context.