On-Body tangible interaction: using the body to support tangible manipulations for immersive visualization

Recent technological advancements in augmented and mixed reality devices opened up many opportunities to users to interact in their environments. However, there are many unanswered questions about the definition of these interaction paradigms. In this article, we present a new approach to interact in these environments: using the body as a physical support to constrain the movement of a multiple degrees of freedom device (3D Mouse). This mouse offers enough degrees of freedom as well as a necessary accuracy to support the interaction. The use of the body as a support for the interaction allows the user to move in his environment and avoids the inherent fatigue of mid-air interactions. Thus, we propose a new design space for tangible interactions on the body, and specifically on the forearm. To validate the feasibility of such an approach, we present an experiment aimed at establishing the range, stability and comfort of gestures performed with a multiple degrees of freedom mouse on the forearm.