Study of an operator assistant for virtual space

This paper describes and evaluates a method to assist an operator to place an object on a surface in a virtual environment without any force feed-back tool. The method used is to apply an attractive power to two face that are likely to be attached. The system checks the distance of these faces and assists the operator by attaching two faces whose distance is less than a certain threshold. The real time calculation is achieved by limiting the number of faces that can be attached. Using this interface, the operator can move an object in some predefined planes. An experiment showed that the method was effective when the operator was requested to precisely place a virtual object in a certain location.