Natural 7DoF navigation & interaction in 3D geovisualisations

Abstract

Geospatial data is becoming increasingly important for many uses, from expert scientific domains to social media interaction. A lot of this data is three-dimensional in nature and in recent years virtual globe software like Google Earth has made visualising such data much easier. However there has not been an equivalent improvement in the way in which users interact with the visualisations. Recognising that navigating a virtual world encompassing data at scales across many orders of magnitude requires a 7-dimensional representation of the view state, we have implemented our AeroSpace 7DoF interaction method [Stannus et al. 2014] in a Geovisualisation testbed built around NASA's World Wind virtual globe software. Our approach expands the two-point touch method [Hancock et al.] to 3D with pinches replacing touches. It surpasses previous two-point work [Wang et al. 2011] [Song et al.] [Schultheis et al. 2012] by allowing direct, bimanual, integral, simultaneous navigation with index-finger-moderated roll around the ambiguous axis, though the virtual hands were offset indirectly to mitigate occlusion. Our system was implemented in an immersive environment with 3 large stereo screens for display and an ARTrack3 system for tracking the users head (via retroreflective markers on stereoscopic glasses) and hands. Custom gloves were used to report pinch and pointing gesture contact states via Bluetooth and provide 5DoF tracking via markers on the index fingers.