A 3D cubic puzzle in pCubee

The 3D cubic puzzle is implemented in a head-coupled cubic display, pCubee[6], that allows users to view a 3D scene from different sides. The display is compact and light enough to be held in one hand by an average adult user. By coupling the display with a 3D stylus, pCubee supports the bimanual Kinetic Chain (KC) model [4] for the cubic puzzle task. Users can hold pCubee in their nondominant hand and the stylus in the dominant hand to manipulate the puzzle pieces. Doing the puzzle in pCubee allows us to explore the bimanual stylus interaction scheme the display affords. Figure 1 shows the setup of our system. Our solution involves puzzle pieces with simulated physics inside pCubee, which we refer to as the “working space”. Each of the puzzle pieces can be picked up and manipulated by a rendered virtual stylus while also reacting to the movement of the pCubee display. The “solution space” in which the users place the puzzle pieces is located at the center above the pCubee floor within the “working space” and is represented by a wireframe boundary. We conducted two user studies to evaluate performance with two different puzzles. Below we describe the interaction design of our cubic puzzle solution, the hardware and software involved and also the results and findings from the two experiments.