Insight into 3D goal-directed movements through a division into meaningful movement phases

The measures that are currently used to evaluate users’ performances on interaction tasks in virtual environments often do not provide sufficient information for how to improve these interactions. The current paper proposes a new method for analyzing 3D goal-directed movements based on dividing them into meaningful phases. We apply the method to experimental data that we have collected earlier for a 3D task that resembles a standardized 2D multi-directional pointing task (ISO 9241-9). Our analysis demonstrates how a more detailed insight into 3D goal-directed movements can be gained. We claim that this analysis can help to better identify weak and strong points of input devices or interaction techniques.