Sphere in Hand: Exploring Tangible Interaction with Immersive Spherical Visualizations

The emerging possibilities of data analysis and exploration in virtual reality raise the question of how users can be best supported during such interactions. Spherical visualizations allow for convenient exploration of certain types of data. Our tangible sphere, exactly aligned with the sphere visualizations shown in VR, implements a very natural way of interaction and utilizes senses and skills trained in the real world. This work is motivated by the prospect to create in VR a low-cost, tangible, robust, handheld spherical display that would be difficult or impossible to implement as a physical display. Our concept enables it to gain insights about the impact of a fully tangible embodiment of a virtual object on task performance, comprehension of patterns, and user behavior. After a description of the implementation we discuss the advantages and disadvantages of our approach, taking into account different handheld spherical displays utilizing outside and inside projection.