Finger gesture-based natural user interface for 3D highway alignment design in virtual environment

Current methods design the highway horizontal and vertical alignments separately in 2DCAD through keyboard and mouse, then combine the alignments into a 3D space curve to obtain the highway centerline. They totally violate highway´s nature because highway is a 3D space linear structure, and seriously affect the design quality ultimately. For this issue, we present a feasible solution that designs interactively the 3D centerline of highway in virtual environment directly in this paper. After analyzing the defects associated with previous user interfaces in navigation and 3D object manipulation, we developed a finger gesture-based user interface, which reduces user physical fatigue and provides better user experience and greater control accuracy. To verify the effectiveness of our interface, we measure the interaction efficiency and control accuracy quantitatively and user-comfort qualitatively, then test results were compared with those of a conventional mouse. The results show that our interface is far better than a mouse interface in terms of naturalness and comfort, and it has the potential to achieve a mouse´s accuracy. Most importantly, a 3D space object can be moved in any directions with gesture, which is very necessary for designing a 3D highway centerline in virtual environment.