Abstract: We describe a new interaction technique, called HoverCam, for navigating around 3D objects at close proximity. When a user is closely inspecting an object, the camera motions needed to move across its surface can become complex. For tasks such as 3D painting or modeling small detail features, users will often try to keep the camera a small distance above the surface. To achieve this automatically, HoverCam intelligently integrates tumbling, panning, and zooming camera controls into a single operation. This allows the user to focus on the task at hand instead of continuously managing the camera position and orientation. In this paper we show unique affordances of the technique and define the behavior and implementation of HoverCam. We also show how the technique can be used for navigating about data sets without well-defined surfaces such as point clouds and curves in space.