F.I.V.E. (Fully Interactive Virtual Environment) is a graphical interface to computer created environments that permits a user to move and interact with objects in it. Interaction is accomplished through the recognition of users hand gestures through a data glove. It was undertaken by Barry McCaul and David Long as part fulfilment of their degree in Computing.

The central idea behind F.I.V.E. was to explore the interaction possibilities offered when conventional input devices we abandoned in favour of datagloves in an attempt to make better use of the dexterous nature of the human hand. Coupled with this was a 3D interface that allowed users to interact with object as they would in the natural word.

Objectives : The central objective of this project is to explore methods for allowing a user to interact in a virtual environment allowing the following primary tasks:

Navigation: Navigation means moving your point of view through 3D space. Examples are, moving through a corridor and into another room, flying over a landscape, rotating about or moving straight up and down. Movement can be constrained or unconstrained.

Selection: Selection involves picking a particular element in the 3D world with the intent of performing an action on it. Examples are, selecting a lamp in a living room in order to reorient it, picking a wall to change its colour or dimension, or selecting an object with your hand in order to pick it up.

Interaction: After selecting an object, how easy is interaction with it? Some common forms of interaction, are moving deforming, and scaling objects. Once the lamp in the living room has been selected, how you move it to a different location is based on interaction.

Command: Some method of controlling or issuing commands to the simulation is required. For example, after selecting an object, you must issue a command to change its colour by pressing a button or turning a knob. Remember that in a fully immersive virtual environment where the user is wearing a head mounted display, they are effectively blind to the real world making the keyboard useless as an input device. Commands could be in the form of specially reserved hand gestures, or a click of the fingers may pull up a drop down menu whereby the user selects an option off of it by pointing to highlight the desired command.

We wanted to enable the virtual explorer to move, or navigate to a particular point in space, to select objects or other entities, to interact with objects, and to issue commands controlling the simulation or the interaction solely by the use of a data glove worn by the user. The strength of data gloves is that they provide intuitive interaction with objects. They also reinforce the sense of presence, by allowing users to see their own hand in the virtual environment. Their weaknesses include the lack of tactile feedback (in the less expensive models), difficulty in precisely navigating 3D space and the training required to learn an extensive set of gestures.