Z-Goto for efficient navigation in 3D environments from discrete inputs

3D interactive applications are now appearing on mobile devices such as phones and PDAs. Compared to classical desktop or immersive configurations, mobile devices induce several constraints that intrinsically limit the user performance in interactive tasks. Consequently, a special effort has to be made in order to adapt the classical 3D user interfaces to mobile settings. In this paper, we propose a new key-based technique that favors navigation in 3D environments. Compared to a classical "go to" approach, our technique called Z-Goto directly operates in the 3D space. This accelerates the user's displacements by reducing the number of required keystrokes. Moreover, the construction of the cognitive maps is improved, as Z-Goto favors depth perception. An experiment shows that Z-Goto obtains better completion times compared to a standard "go to" technique for a primed search task on mobile device. It also shows that the user satisfaction for this new technique is good.