Object manipulation in virtual environments: relative size matters

An experiment was conducted to systematically investigatecombined effects of controller, cursor and target size onmultidimensional object manipulation in a virtual environment. Itwas found that it was the relative size of controller, cursor andtarget that significantly affe&d object transportation andorientation processes. There were significant interactions betweencontroller size and cursor size as well as between cursor size andtarget size on the total task completion time, transportation time,orientation time and spatial errors. The same size of controllerand cursor improved object manipulation speed, and the same size ofcursor and target generally facilitated object manipulationaccuracy, regardless of their absolute sizes. Implications of thesefindings for human-computer interaction design are discussed.