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

Abstract

We survey the state of the art of spatial interfaces for 3D visualization. Interaction techniques are crucial to data visualization processes and the visualization research community has been calling for more research on interaction for years. Yet, research papers focusing on interaction techniques, in particular for 3D visualization purposes, are not always published in visualization venues, sometimes making it challenging to synthesize the latest interaction and visualization results. We therefore introduce a taxonomy of interaction technique for 3D visualization. The taxonomy is organized along two axes: the primary source of input on the one hand and the visualization task they support on the other hand. Surveying the state of the art allows us to highlight specific challenges and missed opportunities for research in 3D visualization. In particular, we call for additional research in: (1) controlling 3D visualization widgets to help scientists better understand their data, (2) 3D interaction techniques for dissemination, which are under‐explored yet show great promise for helping museum and science centers in their mission to share recent knowledge, and (3) developing new measures that move beyond traditional time and errors metrics for evaluating visualizations that include spatial interaction.

Professional Differences: A Comparative Study of Visualization Task Performance and Spatial Ability Across Disciplines

“…The number of participants varied per discipline: 33 Chemistry, 19 Computer Science (CS) and 27 Education. We note that even though our samples are not uniform, our results still provide valuable insights: there is no magic number for participants required in a study [7] and visualization studies often have small numbers of participants with relevant results [9,10]. And when it comes to statistical evidence, confidence intervals (CIs) with just a hand-full of participants can still provide evidence of differences [24].…”

Still room for improvement in traditional 3D interaction: selecting the fixed axis in the virtual trackball

“…cutting planes, lenses or particle emitters) that help users to interactively manipulate 3D spatial objects and data. A recent survey on 3D Interaction techniques for visualization [4] suggests that this is a clear area for future work. This might me a useful mechanism to interactively fix an axis, in inspection of 3D objects of which the shape is not known in advance, or to allow applications to adapt navigation to mental models which can vary across different contexts or users.…”

“…Controlling a virtual camera to navigate a 3D scene is, in general, not a trivial problem [26]. A number of interaction techniques have been proposed to map users' actions into the commands needed for navigation, using both standard and specific input devices, tangible props or gesture recognition [4,19]. In the context of desktop or web-based applications, the use of specific devices for interaction is limited to keyboard and mouse, which provide limited degrees of freedom (DoF).…”

HyperStorylines: Interactively untangling dynamic hypergraphs

“…We recruited 6 participants (4 male and 2 female), who were all HCI or visualization experts with between 3 and 16 years of practice. We consider this number of participants sufficient, as HCI and visualization studies often have small numbers of participants but with relevant results 54,55 and there is no magic number of participants 56 . When it comes to statistical evidence, our method of using CIs can still provide evidence of differences with even two participants 57 .…”