A virtual glovebox for the digital enterprise

The employment of simulation technology together with the exploration of virtual environments promise to be a unique advantage for digital enterprises in diverse fields like planning, rapid prototyping, marketing and presentations, as well as information dissemination and training. However, there are serious obstacles that inhibit digital enterprises to take a competitive advantage when using 3D for business processes. Most of these obstacles are concerned with the fact that 2D interaction metaphors are used for interacting with 3D content. With the motivation to help a digital enterprise to benefit from the advantages of applying 3D and virtual reality for different purposes and different user groups, this paper introduces an innovative dedicated interaction device for the digital enterprise. It employs the metaphor of a glove box where stereoscopic visualization together with haptic feedback is given in a natural manner. This makes it intuitive to manipulate three-dimensional content and makes it easy for users to navigate and to orient themselves in a virtual 3D world. Beside presenting the Virtual Glove Box device, we will discuss its advantages for new industrial organisations and deal with the question how to integrate it in existing structures and processes of an enterprise.