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Tangible views for information visualization

Published: 07 November 2010 Publication History

Abstract

In information visualization, interaction is commonly carried out by using traditional input devices, and visual feedback is usually given on desktop displays. By contrast, recent advances in interactive surface technology suggest combining interaction and display functionality in a single device for a more direct interaction. With our work, we contribute to the seamless integration of interaction and display devices and introduce new ways of visualizing and directly interacting with information. Rather than restricting the interaction to the display surface alone, we explicitly use the physical three-dimensional space above it for natural interaction with multiple displays. For this purpose, we introduce tangible views as spatially aware lightweight displays that can be interacted with by moving them through the physical space on or above a tabletop display's surface. Tracking the 3D movement of tangible views allows us to control various parameters of a visualization with more degrees of freedom. Tangible views also facilitate making multiple -- previously virtual -- views physically "graspable". In this paper, we introduce a number of interaction and visualization patterns for tangible views that constitute the vocabulary for performing a variety of common visualization tasks. Several implemented case studies demonstrate the usefulness of tangible views for widely used information visualization approaches and suggest the high potential of this novel approach to support interaction with complex visualizations.

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cover image ACM Conferences
ITS '10: ACM International Conference on Interactive Tabletops and Surfaces
November 2010
327 pages
ISBN:9781450303996
DOI:10.1145/1936652
Permission to make digital or hard copies of all or part of this work for personal or classroom use is granted without fee provided that copies are not made or distributed for profit or commercial advantage and that copies bear this notice and the full citation on the first page. Copyrights for components of this work owned by others than ACM must be honored. Abstracting with credit is permitted. To copy otherwise, or republish, to post on servers or to redistribute to lists, requires prior specific permission and/or a fee. Request permissions from [email protected]

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Publication History

Published: 07 November 2010

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Author Tags

  1. focus + context techniques
  2. interaction techniques
  3. magic lenses
  4. multi-surface user interfaces
  5. multiple views
  6. tabletop displays
  7. tangible views

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ITS'10
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ITS'10: Interactive Tabletops and Surfaces
November 7 - 10, 2010
Saarbrücken, Germany

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  • (2023)A Design Space of Multi-Display Spatial Interactions for Visualization TasksProceedings of the 2023 ACM Symposium on Spatial User Interaction10.1145/3607822.3614516(1-13)Online publication date: 13-Oct-2023
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