When designing 3D objects in 3D virtual environments using naturalistic 3D user interfaces, people use their hands to manipulate the environment and objects inside it. At the same time, people utilize their spatial thinking to understand the spatial relationship of the objects in the scene. Yet, the relationship between spatial thinking and hand actions remains unclear. Here, we present a user study with 18 participants that examines the association between 3D assembling tasks and reflective hand movements that allow people to enhance their spatial thinking. Utilizing a mixed-methods protocol, we identified nine SPATIAL HAND ACTIONS and three SPATIAL THEMES people use when designing 3D objects. Then, we analyzed a subset of the participants to understand the relationship between SPATIAL HAND ACTIONS and spatial abilities. Our results will help develop better hand-based naturalistic 3DUI that considers the spatial thinking abilities of the users.
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3706598.3713424
The ACM CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems (https://chi2025.acm.org/)