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A Design Study of Direct‐Touch Interaction for Exploratory 3D Scientific Visualization
Author(s) -
Klein Tijmen,
Guéniat Florimond,
Pastur Luc,
Vernier Frédéric,
Isenberg Tobias
Publication year - 2012
Publication title -
computer graphics forum
Language(s) - English
Resource type - Journals
SCImago Journal Rank - 0.578
H-Index - 120
eISSN - 1467-8659
pISSN - 0167-7055
DOI - 10.1111/j.1467-8659.2012.03115.x
Subject(s) - visualization , computer science , human–computer interaction , interaction design , domain (mathematical analysis) , zoom , interaction technique , data visualization , field (mathematics) , scientific visualization , data science , artificial intelligence , gesture , engineering , petroleum engineering , pure mathematics , mathematical analysis , mathematics , lens (geology)
We present an interaction design study of several non‐overlapping direct‐touch interaction widgets, postures, and bi‐manual techniques to support the needs of scientists who are exploring a dataset. The final interaction design supports navigation/zoom, cutting plane interaction, a drilling exploration, the placement of seed particles in 3D space, and the exploration of temporal data evolution. To ground our design, we conducted a requirements analysis and used a participatory design approach throughout development. We chose simulations in the field of fluid mechanics as our example domain and, in the paper, discuss our choice of techniques, their adaptation to our target domain, and discuss how they facilitate the necessary combination of visualization control and data exploration. We evaluated our resulting interactive data exploration system with seven fluid mechanics experts and report on their qualitative feedback. While we use flow visualization as our application domain, the developed techniques were designed with generalizability in mind and we discuss several implications of our work on further development of direct‐touch data exploration techniques for scientific visualization in general.