Tangible windows for a free exploration of wide 3D virtual environment

Exploring virtual environment with immersive metaphor is still largely unexplored, with the costly CAVE exception. This question takes importance in lots of fields, such as fluid mechanics, where space and time resolved dataset become more and more common. For that reason, we present an interaction design study of an window exploration metaphor, for large 3D virtual environment. The metaphor is based on the use of a tablet as a tangible and movable window on a virtual environment. Rotations in the environment are tracker-less mapped on the rotations of the tablet. Our design is inspired by fluid mechanics issues, but is build keeping generalizability in mind. The study shows that mapping three degrees of freedom onto corresponding real three degrees of freedom of space raises the transparency, the efficiency of data exploration and the space awareness of users.