3D Virtual Environment (3DVE) comes up as a good solution for transmitting knowledge in a museum exhibit. However, interaction techniques involved in such settings are mostly based on traditional devices such as keyboard and mouse. Recently, the popular use of smartphone as a personal handled computer lets us envision the use of mobile device as an interaction support with these 3DVE. In this paper, we focus on the navigation task inside a 3DVE and we propose to use the smartphone as a tangible object. Physical actions on the smartphone trigger translations and rotations in the 3DVE. In order to prove the interest in the use of the smartphone, we compare our solution with available solutions: keyboard-mouse and 3D mouse. User experiments confirmed our hypothesis and particularly emphasizes that visitors find our solution more attractive and stimulating.