We describe an advanced user interface enabling even playing games in an immersive virtual environment. There are no common input devices, users presence in the environment, movements, and body postures are only available tools for interacting with totally hidden computer. Furthermore, a publicly accessible installation in the Vienna Museum of Technology implementing such an advanced environment is described. In this installation computers are totally hidden, and it is one of the most popular exhibits in the museum, which has been accessed by more than 200,000 visitors since September 1999.

This project is a joint research activity between  1.) the application research area 3 at the VRVis Research Center in Vienna, Austria ,  2.)  Institute for Design and Assessment of Technology, Vienna University of Technology and  3.)  Austrian Research Institute for Artificial Intelligence, Vienna, Austria

Parts of this work have been carried out as part of the application research area 3 in the VRVis Research Center, which is funded by the Austrian governmental research project Kplus.

We have realized and installed an advanced user interface in an immersive virtual environment accessible for a large public. Some extra work had to be done to develop the lab prototype to be functional in a public environment. By utilizing well-known metaphors and analogies the user interface was understood by almost all users. We have shown that it is possible to realize an advanced interaction scheme in an immersive virtual environment, which is well adopted by everyday users, satisfying all four interface design requirements described by Bowman and Hodges and realizing a stable and reliable setup to simulate a mouse input without requiring the user to handle any input device. The idea of using this advanced interface as an input for games originated from the environment in which the system was installed. The playful interaction between technology and humans is a widely used way to transport knowledge in a museum. For modern museums the interaction between exhibited objects and visitors is a way of getting people to be really involved with the themes. Especially school classes populated the system with great pleasure during their visit to the museum.

The public accepted the installation and tried to communicate with the IP with anticipation. Most of the users’ cognitive power is absorbed by the IA and its effort to communicate with the users. The actual interface to the game is not the main intellectual task for the users. Most of them try to understand what the IA has to tell them. By giving the users an understandable metaphor of someone living in the mirror, they do not concentrate on learning the usage of the interface. So the simplest learning scheme imitation is performed by nearly all visitors. The hardest task for the users is to recognize that they are playing a game. Once users made that cognitive step, the interfaces were well understood.

The most difficult part was developing a vision system which would function in a non-controllable light environment.