Embodied lenses for collaborative visual queries on tabletop displays

Abstract

We introduce embodied lenses for visual queries on tabletop surfaces using physical interaction. The lenses are simply thin sheets of paper or transparent foil decorated with fiducial markers, allowing them to be tracked by a diffuse illumination tabletop display. The physical affordance of these embodied lenses allow them to be overlapped, causing composition in the underlying virtual space. We perform a formative evaluation to study users' conceptual models for overlapping physical lenses. This is followed by a quantitative user study comparing performance for embodied versus purely virtual lenses. Results show that embodied lenses are equally efficient compared to purely virtual lenses, and also support tactile and eyes-free interaction. We then present several examples of the technique, including image layers, map layers, image manipulation, and multidimensional data visualization. The technique is simple, cheap, and can be integrated into many existing tabletop displays.

tPad

“…The resulting interactions resemble known concepts shown with tool-glasses and magic lenses [4], tangible views [16,31], and aspects of mobile AR [3]. [16] and 3D head tracking [29].…”

T4 - transparent and translucent tangibles on tabletops

“…Foils are usually made of very thin and bendable transparencies (e.g., cellulose acetate) [13,15]. The TaPS widget [17] combines foil and acrylic glass.…”

“…Especially in the sense of toolglasses and magic lenses as proposed by Bier et al [3] transparent foils are useful. Systems using foils in that form are interfaces such as geo-lenses or graphic filters [9,13,15]. There they represent an additional layer or a different view on the data presented underneath.…”

“…providing different views or manipulation of the presented information. Examples for that are tangible magic lenses [13,15,26], the function tiles of the Tangible Tiles system [28] or the application tiles of DataTiles [21]. By putting the tangible on an interactive surface or by positioning it on a digital object, specific functions, such as magnifying the content below, translating text or invoking an application are automatically applied.…”

“…Beyond that, digital content can be manipulated through the tangible by touch or pen input. This paper has three main contributions and is structured [9,13,15], (b) Plates [9,21,25,28], (c) Tokens [4,6,7,9,11,12,17,19,22], (d) Blocks [1,25,30], (e) Compound Forms [10,29].…”