Object Manipulation in a Dynamically Simulated Virtual Environment

In a virtual environment that is closely modeled after the real world, the movement of objects has to be governed by Newtonian mechanics, including collision detection and response. Consequently, during the manipulation of an object by the user this object should still be dynamically simulated as its manipulation might have consequences for other objects in the scene or vice versa. As a result, the manipulation of the object has to be done by applying forces and torques to the object. This can either be done directly by the user or indirectly by a controlling algorithm which in turn is controlled by the user. Such an indirect method is given by using a proxy object which is a copy of the object to be manipulated and which acts as an attractor for the original object. The proxy object can be controlled kinematically using well known standard interaction techniques. This also allows reducing the degrees of freedom to be manipulated at a time, so that low dimensional input devices such as a conventional mouse can also be used for interaction.