Believable interaction with a quasi-tangible tabletop interface

In this paper, we present a believable interaction mechanism for manipulation multiple objects in ubiquitous/augmented virtual environment. A believable interaction in multimodal framework is defined as a persistent and consistent process according to contextual experiences and common‐senses on the feedbacks. We present a tabletop interface as a quasi‐tangible framework to provide believable processes. An enhanced tabletop interface is designed to support multimodal environment. As an exemplar task, we applied the concept to fast accessing and manipulating distant objects. A set of enhanced manipulation mechanisms is presented for remote manipulations including inertial widgets, transformable tabletop, and proxies. The proposed method is evaluated in both performance and user acceptability in comparison with previous approaches. The proposed technique uses intuitive hand gestures and provides higher level of believability. It can also support other types of accessing techniques such as browsing and manipulation. Copyright © 2007 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.