Virtual Lenses as Embodied Tools for Immersive Analytics

TL;DR

This paper introduces virtual, graspable lenses for immersive 3D data analysis, enabling flexible, natural interaction with data views in virtual environments, demonstrated through a sonar data analysis system.

Contribution

It presents a novel design of virtual lenses inspired by real-world magnifying glasses, tailored for 3D immersive environments, and demonstrates their usability in a sonar data analysis system.

Findings

User feedback indicates ease of use for data exploration.

Lenses facilitate flexible creation and manipulation of data views.

System supports effective analysis of complex 3D sonar data.

Abstract

Interactive lenses are useful tools for supporting the analysis of data in different ways. Most existing lenses are designed for 2D visualization and are operated using standard mouse and keyboard interaction. On the other hand, research on virtual lenses for novel 3D immersive visualization environments is scarce. Our work aims to narrow this gap in the literature. We focus particularly on the interaction with lenses. Inspired by natural interaction with magnifying glasses in the real world, our lenses are designed as graspable tools that can be created and removed as needed, manipulated and parameterized depending on the task, and even combined to flexibly create new views on the data. We implemented our ideas in a system for the visual analysis of 3D sonar data. Informal user feedback from more than a hundred people suggests that the designed lens interaction is easy to use for the task of finding a hidden wreck in sonar data.