Survey of 3DUI applications and development challenges

We present a survey of the current generation of 3D user interface (3DUI) applications, their developers, and development issues. 3DUI developing experiences from 71 developers - as well as information about 56 unique 3DUI applications - were collected and analysed. The statistics presented in this paper give a broad view over the 3DUI field and indicate current trends in 3DUI applications, such as the most commonly used hardware and software. Popularity of Kinect and Move controllers are compared as we discuss how entertainment industry can embrace hobbyist innovation. Our results show that reuse of high-level interaction features is rare, even though 3DUI toolkits are widely used; most developers painstakingly implement common features like navigation and object manipulation for each 3DUI application, as opposed to inheriting them from a toolkit. We also introduce criteria for measuring 3DUI development difficulty and two ways of benchmarking 3DUI toolkits, and present example benchmarks using data from our survey.