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David Englmeier, Isabel Schönewald, Andreas Butz, Tobias Höllerer
Feel the Globe: Enhancing the Perception of Immersive Spherical Visualizations with Tangible Proxies
In Proceedings of the 26th IEEE Conference on Virtual Reality and 3D User Interfaces (IEEE VR 2019), Workshop on Novel Input Devices and Interaction Techniques. Osaka, Japan, March 23 - 27, 2019.

Recent developments in the commercialization of virtual realityopen up many opportunities for enhancing human interaction withthree-dimensional objects and visualizations. Spherical visualiza-tions allow for convenient exploration of certain types of data. Ourtangible sphere, exactly aligned with the sphere visualizations shownin VR, implements a very natural way of interaction and utilizessenses and skills trained in the real world. In a lab study, we in-vestigate the effects of the perception of actually holding a virtualspherical visualization in hands. As use cases, we focus on surfacevisualizations that benefit from or require a rounded shape. Wecompared the usage of two differently sized acrylic glass spheres toa related interaction technique that utilizes VR controllers as proxies.On the one hand, our work is motivated by the ability to create in VRa tangible, lightweight, handheld spherical display that can hardlybe realized in reality. On the other hand, gaining insights aboutthe impact of a fully tangible embodiment of a virtual object ontask performance, comprehension of patterns, and user behavior isimportant in its own right. After a description of the implementationwe discuss the advantages and disadvantages of our approach, takinginto account different handheld spherical displays utilizing outsideand inside projection.