A Design Study of Direct‐Touch Interaction for Exploratory 3D Scientific Visualization

Abstract

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.

Interactive Exploration of Three-Dimensional Scientific Visualizations on Large Display Surfaces

“…Fig. 15 Design study of a surface-based system for the exploration of fluid flow simulations [55]. Image (a) from [52], © IEEE, used by permission.…”

“…Image (a) from [52], © IEEE, used by permission. Image (b) from [55], © Eurographics Association, used by permission.…”

“…A small user study conducted by Song et al suggests that their hybrid interaction can outperform a PC-based interface with equivalent controls with respect to interaction time. Klein et al [55], instead, concentrate on capturing input only on a single large display, but design their system for the exploration of fluid simulations to provide similar interaction techniques (Fig. 15): the navigation of the overall dataset, cutting plane manipulation, data value probing, particle seeding, visualization parameterization, and temporal exploration.…”

Reimagining the Scientific Visualization Interaction Paradigm

“…New display environments, such as the CAVE and Responsive Workbench, have enabled not only new methods for stereoscopic presentation of data but also new interaction paradigms. More recently, interfaces for Scientific Sketching have shown us how scientists and artists can prototype data visualizations in virtual reality using natural sketchbased input [5], and gesture and touch have been used to interact with volumetric scientific data [6].…”

“…Current cutting-edge research in this area has taken some initial steps toward addressing the problem, specifically within the contexts of fluid flow [6] (Fig. 2), medical imaging [1] (Fig.…”