“CubeCam: a screen-space camera manipulation tool” by Sudarsanam, Grimm and Singh

Manipulating a virtual camera in 3D environments is hard. In order to completely specify a camera, 11 distinct degrees of freedom need to be defined. Standard mouse-based techniques can control only a subset of this large 11 dimensional space at any given time by using an array of menu options, shortcut keys and key modifiers. Given the myriad of camera manipulation tools available, it is hard for the user to know which tool to use in order to obtain their desired view of the scene. “Camera bookmarks” is also an overlooked area of camera manipulation. Camera bookmarks are interesting views that have been saved by the user. Current techniques use a textual list to represent bookmarks and provide no method to organize them. The goal of our system is to provide an intuitive camera manipulation interface which moves away from the above menu-driven techniques. In our interface, the way in which user changes the camera is directly correlated with the way in which the projected image would change. Changes are made to the camera while staying in the 2D image space. Finally, our interface provides a visual method of representing camera bookmarks.

1. Singh, K., Grimm, C., And Sudarsanam, N. 2004. The ibar: A perspective-based camera widget. In UIST.