Virtual Object Manipulation Using Physical Blocks

In this paper, we present a virtual object manipulation tool that can directly control virtual objects using physical objects. Physical objects can be recognized by vision based sensing. Basic manipulations using physical objects are translating, rotating, scaling and replacing with a virtual object. Those manipulations are performed by handling an object, a block. In addition to this, complicated manipulations can be realized by handling two objects with both hands. We have implemented a prototype system and assessed the effectiveness of the system by experimentally comparing it with general modeling tool. The results suggest that our object manipulation system can provide a more effective means of handling than operations in general modeling tool.