Augmenting Tactile 3D Data Navigation With Pressure Sensing

Abstract

We present a pressure‐augmented tactile 3D data navigation technique, specifically designed for small devices, motivated by the need to support the interactive visualization beyond traditional workstations. While touch input has been studied extensively on large screens, current techniques do not scale to small and portable devices. We use phone‐based pressure sensing with a binary mapping to separate interaction degrees of freedom (DOF) and thus allow users to easily select different manipulation schemes (e. g., users first perform only rotation and then with a simple pressure input to switch to translation). We compare our technique to traditional 3D‐RST (rotation, scaling, translation) using a docking task in a controlled experiment. The results show that our technique increases the accuracy of interaction, with limited impact on speed. We discuss the implications for 3D interaction design and verify that our results extend to older devices with pseudo pressure and are valid in realistic phone usage scenarios.

The State of the Art of Spatial Interfaces for 3D Visualization

“…Several of these techniques rely upon more‐than‐2‐finger gestures or screen‐space widgets that are appropriate for large displays but may not translate well to smaller, mobile displays. For smaller displays, pressure has been used to augment tactile interaction, in particular to separate DOFs when manipulating 3D objects [WBAI17, WBAI19]. In this work, a combination of light and hard touches with one or two fingers were used to independently manipulate translation and rotation along the ‐ and ‐axes or the ‐axis.…”

“…Researchers have adapted tactile interactions for visualization to different computing platforms (e.g. small displays), in part, by augmenting touch with additional inputs, such as pressure [WBAI19]. Researchers have also shown the utility of dataset‐specific tactile interfaces (e.g.…”

Separation, Composition, or Hybrid? – Comparing Collaborative 3D Object Manipulation Techniques for Handheld Augmented Reality

“…Similarly, DOF separation was also investigated for single-user techniques. Here, related work [22,32,34] showed that a separation of translation and rotation actions can increase performance, outperforming a simultaneous manipulation of all DOFs.…”

Understanding differences between combinations of 2D and 3D input and output devices for 3D data visualization

“…According to previous studies, users sometimes express high preferences for decomposing manipulations to accomplish complicated tasks (e. g., separating the motions of translation and rotation). Such DOF separation, which can easily be achieved with low-DOF input devices, favors tasks that require a high amount of accuracy (Bérard et al, 2009;Veit et al, 2009;Wang et al, 2019a). Even for immersive environments, it has been argued that the mouse and keyboard are still essential for data exploration as we cannot totally separate the visualization from other analysis processes that require the use of traditional PC-based tools (Wang et al, 2020).…”