On-Body Tangible Interaction: Using the Body to Support Tangible Manipulations for Immersive Environments

Abstract

Recent technological advances in immersive devices open up many opportunities for users to visualize data in their environments. However, current interactive solutions fail at providing a convenient approach to manipulate such complex immersive visualizations. In this article, we present a new approach to interact in these environments, that we call On-Body Tangible interaction (OBT): using the body to physically support the manipulation of an input device. The use of the body to support the interaction allows the user to move in his environment and avoid the inherent fatigue of mid-air interactions. In this paper, we explore the use of a rolling device, which fits well on-body interaction thanks to its form factor and offers enough degrees of freedom (DoF) for data manipulation. We first propose a new design space for OBT interactions, and specifically on the forearm. Then we validate the feasibility of such an approach through an experiment aimed at establishing the range, stability and comfort of gestures performed with the device on the forearm. Our results reveal that on-body tangible interaction on the forearm is stable and offers multiple DoFs with little fatigue. We illustrate the benefits of our approach through sample applications where OBT interactions are used to select and execute space-time cube operations.

Grand Challenges in Immersive Analytics

“…However, prototyping such device combinations is difficult [104], and many of these interaction modalities are not mature enough to allow a systematic use for analytic tasks. For instance, on-body interaction has received much attention [113,120,146], but previous work has mostly explored the use of such modalities for simple tasks. Understanding the relation between tasks and technologies will allow Immersive Analytics systems to exploit the rich interactive techniques of immersive systems to conduct analysis tasks as efficiently as on regular desktop environments.…”

HoloBar: Rapid Command Execution for Head-Worn AR Exploiting Around the Field-of-View Interaction

“…Other approaches include leveraging body parts and body motion for menu selection. This includes the use of the palm of the hand [3], the forearm [2,52], the face [54] for direct commands access, as well as motion such as directional walking [59] for menu selection. On-body interactions offer a physical delimiter for interaction, and they usually tend to limit fatigue [52], but require most often the use of an external device to detect the body related gestures.…”

“…This procedure raises two major issues: 1) displaying menus in an already narrow FoV occludes the displayed content and limits the menu size [7], and 2) mid-air gestures are rather difficult to perform accurately [48]. Numerous works have focused on the combination of HMDs and smartphones, which can be considered as an always-available device, avoiding the need to add dedicated or costly devices [52,22,55]. As underlined in [37,61] combining both devices extends the limited size of HMD's FoV, exploits the accuracy of the touchscreen's tactile input, and augments the number of input degrees of freedom [8].…”

An Extended Complementary Filter for Full-Body MARG Orientation Estimation

“…Through this product line, the ECF has been implemented in more than 200 publications worldwide. A small sampling of very recent areas of impact that rely on the ECF through the product line include: human motion tracking [41], sports performance [42], safety [43], telemedicine [44], mobile robotics [3], rehabilitation [45], assistive technology [46], veterinary science [47], virtual reality [4], and even entirely new applications, such as smart agriculture [48] and music composition [49]. In the spirit of transparent dissemination we have released open source code for the ECF which has been downloaded over 50 000 times.…”

“…The development of Microelectromechanical Systems (MEMS) for inertial sensing radically reduced required dimension and cost, leading to widespread use of IMU/MARG (Magnetic, Angular Rate, and Gravity) sensor packages. Field applications are proliferating in robotics [3], virtual reality [4], aerospace [5], and a myriad of other industries. Moreover, inertial systems embedded in small wearable devices have seen rampant growth in human performance (e.g., sports, telemedicine) [6]- [9] and cybernetics (e.g., robot interface) [10]- [13], where small form factor and low power are vital.…”